


Empyrean

by nodere



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Chronic Illness, Fantasy AU, Gore, Other, dreamscape, major character chronic illness, minor gore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-17
Updated: 2019-02-20
Packaged: 2019-10-11 12:15:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 26,278
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17446799
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nodere/pseuds/nodere
Summary: Pathfinders pass through the realm of sleep, seekers of knowledge and enlightenment. They travel in groups of five, their bodies marked with the map of their voyage. The Train takes them where they need to be, from one trial to the next on their spiritual journey until they can awaken.Having failed at completing the trial, four such voyagers, suspended at the threshold of Dream and unable to leave or awaken, wait for the Train to return.One night a single traveler appears, missing his right arm and the memory of how he came to this liminal space.The Train waits at the station.





	1. Dreamscape

Reality within the depths of night has no more substance than the lucid dream.

\- Anonymous, Kokinshu 647

 

+++

 

The Man Who Did Not Know His Name stepped out of the train. His tired boots struck the platform with the soft thud of worn soles. One path led away along a boardwalk, and he followed it, continuing along through a dense growth of trees. Leafy boughs cast their shadows in stark silhouette against the luminous spell of the full moon. The man raised his head toward its light, watching stars wink into existence like a glittery blanket covering the world. Night fell quiet as he passed. Crickets silenced their song, and the wind held its breath, creeping through the foliage until he was gone.

The forest gave way to a village, and the walkway deposited him beside a road of hard-packed earth. Tiny cottages nestled cozily at either side. Street lamps blazed with the golden haze of gaslight before each one. Behind the line of homes to his left, the man heard the babbling rush of a river and the creaking of an old wooden watermill farther upstream.

The shadow of a memory crept into his mind: a scrap of parchment on a plush velvet seat cushion. When he'd awoken, he had found it there with words folded inside that made no sense. Curious and with no one else in the car, he had stashed it away. Reaching into his pocket, he dug around for it now and pulling it out, unfolded it to see the letters spill across the page. They rearranged themselves as he read it to himself:

_“Some call it Shantytown, or the Place Between. Welcome, Dear Traveler, to the Threshold of Dream.”_

The garnet ink flowed out, and the letters blurred until they were nothing but a smear of color. A map took form from the ink, of the very road upon which he stood with each house drawn in. A large X appeared beside one closer to the mill with a dashed line leading him toward it.

With nothing to lose, for he was no one, and with everything to gain, the man followed his treasure map. While the road itself was well-lit, the cottages behind it were dark; no light leaked out through closed shutters, the only exception his destination. This house appeared notably smaller than the others he had passed. Torches blazed above the lush hedge that lined a narrow path of shale stone leading to the door. Terracotta shingles tiled the pagoda-like roof, and an excess of round paper lanterns hung from the eaves. Fireflies danced in and out of each globe like candles flickering in a breeze only the air here was dead still. A wooden sign, carved and painted, hung out front, indicating, at least from what the man could tell, that this was some sort of artisan's shop. Light shone through the open windows, and he could hear the hum and sizzle of electricity alongside the conversation from within.

He approached the door with caution, squeezing his tall, architectural form between the foliage. He listened, picking out four distinct voices: a soft-spoken tenor, a sharp-edged alto, one loud honeyed laugh followed by a gurgle of liquid, and a particularly expressive tone with a slight rasp that clung to the edges of each spoken phrase. An indignant huff of feigned offense broke through the night before the four relaxed into the joyful noise of comfortable friendship. The man heard their words as his own and breathed relief.

At least they spoke the same language.

Squaring his shoulders and standing up straight, he reached for the lion-headed knocker and knocked three times. As if the acoustics of the night had amplified the sound to a deafening roar, everything suddenly ground to a halt. The electric buzz abruptly ceased. Something scraped across the floor. Rustles, thumps, and loud splashes echoed from within.

Someone cleared their throat. “One moment.” It was the last voice, and hearing it again, the man decided it was kind. In short order, the door opened, and he looked down upon a smooth, pallid face framed by an excess of inky black hair that reflected no light. Indigo-gray eyes stared unmoving into his. He searched those eyes as he stood there, finding in them the immeasurable expanse of-

What exactly, he could not place, nor did he have the mind space to recall it at present, but all the same, he took comfort in its familiarity.

“Are you all right? Are you lost?”

The questions recalled him from his thoughts and The Man Who Did Not Know His Name tore himself away from the limitless gaze that held him. "Yes, uh, I mean, I think so. See, I have this map," he thrust it out at arm's length, "and it brought me here."

The man who had answered the door blinked, long and slow. Five small stars arced along one high cheekbone, tattooed there, the bleed out in tiny veins, like fibers through his flesh. A viscous, red liquid stained his fingers and nails as if caught in the act of some heinous crime. Breaking eye contact, he grunted, nonchalantly wiping his hands clean with a rag clenched in one hand before bending over to daub at his shin, smearing sweat and ink with oozing pinpricks of blood. He was the artist, and he had created on himself a pitted and dusty landscape poised starkly against a background of planets, the closest one half-destroyed with only a crescent shell remaining as chunks of crust, mantle, and core burst forth, captured in suspended animation. Every line was inked with exceptional precision, executing shading with dots and striations to resemble an engraving. Unrecognizable script arced up along the side of the image that began to reconfigure into familiar letters.

He hastily rolled down his pant leg before it could be read. Except for his face, where only the stars dared tread, nearly all of his visible flesh was a patchwork of tattoos, the dominant design seemingly celestial charts, but masses of land and waterways intertwined with the interstellar roadmap. All the pathways shimmered in the light, the color ranging from the most vivid purple to the warmest vermilion.

An electric needle lay upon a small table, likely where he had been working, open pots of ink and stacks of paper with scribbles and sketches littered the surface, partially burying a sheathed knife with a wrapped guard. He tossed the rag over to it before snatching the proffered map. He studied it intensely before handing it back. “Come in.”

Taking his cue, The Man Who Did Not Know His Name returned the map to his pocket and stepped inside.

After peering out into the darkness, the tattooist shut the door. “It’s been a very long time since a traveler arrived here alone. You are alone?”

“Yes.”

“My name is Keith.” He rolled up his right sleeve and held out his forearm like this was his ritual of greeting instead of shaking hands. Interstellar pathways shifted and realigned, displaying the letters that formed his name for long enough to read before relaxing again to their former positions. “What’s yours?”

The Man Who Did Not Know His Name merely stared.

Keith tried again, tapping the place where his name had just been. “This is my point of origin, my name, and where I come from. Everyone who travels through here has that,” he ran a finger beneath a red scarf around his neck, tugging on it loosely and biting his lip with one sharp canine as he thought, “It grows as you travel, branches out adding each new place you go.”

“In Dream?”

Keith nodded.

“So, you didn’t put it there, it just happens?”

Nodded again, Keith hummed.

He didn’t know what to say.

Perhaps his own name would be in a similar place, but looking down, he noticed his right arm was gone. The sleeve of his shirt, stretched taut around his bicep, was neatly folded and pinned just below. He touched the stump through the coarse fabric, feeling only a scarred mass of knotted sinew and twisted skin. Healed. Old. Nausea hit him, a cold sweat prickled through the shorn hair at his nape. _When did this happen?_ He asked himself. _How?_ Anxiously, he checked himself to make sure nothing else had disappeared, patting down his broad chest, around his hips, groin, legs. He wiggled his toes and counted his remaining fingers, then brought his hand to his face. Two eyes, nose, though something felt strange there too. He looked around for a mirror but upon seeing none, tried to catch for his reflection in the window glass, and there it was, a scar tracing the topography of his face from one cheek to the other across the bridge of his nose. He almost recoiled at the sight of himself. 

Keith didn’t seem to mind though. His mouth ticked up in a lopsided smile, and he pressed his lips to his closed fist to keep from laughing outright. “This is Dream, you know. Things here are as you make them, well, most things. There are rules, but if you want your arm back, all you have to do is imagine it.”

"Oh." The Man Who Did Not Know His Name felt silly but wasn't sure why. No malice lay hidden in the words or the fine features of the face that scrutinized him. Looking around the small room, he thought it seemed larger within than it had from without. Oil lamps, candles, and electric lights illuminated the space, stacks of Oriental rugs, cushions, and pillows lined an opening in the floor that exposed the flow of the river below. For a split second, he thought he saw a large dark shadow of something moving beneath the water. Only one other room lay visible beyond; presumably, a kitchen stuffed chock full of appliances, a disarray of pans, utensils, and dishes. For whatever reason, a large sandstone boulder sat blocking the open doorway between the rooms, and around the open window, wound twisting tendrils and leafy vines.

“You can sit.” Keith gestured to a stool beside his worktable. “Are you hungry?”

“Uh,” the man stalled. He hadn’t answered any of Keith’s questions. What did any of it even mean? _Dream_? _Threshold of Dream_? He pulled out the pin holding his sleeve in place, and squeezing his eyes tightly shut, he pictured the stump of his missing arm, fashioning a new one. From seemingly nothing, he forged a sheet of smoothly polished metal and formed it to mirror the contour of his left arm and hand. It shone with the high gleam of silvery white. White like his name.

What was his name?

Keith reached out to touch it, fingertips tracing the contour of the new arm. “See? You’re catching on-”

A shiver ran up his faux arm like a jolt of lightning from the shocking chill of Keith’s icy touch. He had felt it through his new prosthesis, triggering something deep within.

A memory.

“Shiro,” he blurted out. “My name is Shiro!”

As soon as he’d spoken, bubbling water splashed and popped at the surface of the strange opening over the river. Shiro craned his neck to the noise and Keith turned toward it, brows arched high on his forehead. Whatever had surfaced had just as quickly retreated again.

“Lance?” he called, “Will you come out to meet Shiro?”

“You touched him!” Petulant jealousy burbled up from beneath the floorboards.

Though now fraught with indignant venom, the laughter Shiro had heard from outside the cottage had belonged to this same voice.

“Come on!” Keith knelt at the edge and extended his hand.

“Nuh-uh, no way. You don’t know where he’s been. _I_ don’t know where he’s been.”

"You don't know where I've been either," Keith retorted, exasperated.

A sun-kissed face shot up through the surface, chestnut hair plastered to his head. “Don’t try that on me, I know exactly where you’ve been. It’s written all over you!”

Shiro snorted, struggling himself to suppress a small grin.

Piercing eyes like chips of sapphire hurled daggers his way. Lance shook his head violently, sending droplets of spray fresh and cold across the room. "I wasn't talking to _you_!"

Unlike Keith, Shiro couldn’t see a single piece of a map on him, though Lance was only visible above his shoulders. When Lance finally reached out for Keith’s hand, Shiro spotted cerulean whorls of currents and waves twisting from his fingertips up his arms.

Keith pulled away, standing. “Get yourself up.”

Lance cupped a palm and splashed him. "Not nice," he laughed, salty and sweet, carrying with it the breath of the sea.

Shiro sighed and sat down, cross-legged at the edge of the waterhole. The leafy vines rustled at the window, though Shiro felt no air. From the periphery of his vision, he thought he saw something move, but when he turned toward it, the vines around the casement looked the same.

Giggling, Lance splashed him too, with a two-handed swipe against the surface of the dark water.

Shiro rubbed his face with a soaking sleeve, again catching a brief glimpse of something moving by the window. “Is there - is someone there?” he pointed.

“Pidge!” Lance called.

Fine tendrils curled around the frame, and two bright eyes like polished copper peered in above the sill. “I’ve never seen such a- wait- is he?”

Keith nodded. “A traveler.”

Shiro wondered as he watched. With a rustle soft as a feather-down sigh, a waifish girl gripped the sill with both hands and hauled herself up and into the room, landing softly beside the strange boulder no longer blocking the entrance to the kitchen.

The girl eyed him cautiously, up and down, one hand on her hip, the other twisting a ringlet of vines around a finger from the circlet on her head. Nearly indistinguishable from autumn leaves, her amber hair curled wildly around her face, shifting at her every movement with the mutability of the seasons but returning always to fall.

“Are you alone?” Pidge asked softly, maintaining her distance but leaning ever so slightly toward him.

"I think so." Shiro hesitated. "I mean, when I awoke on the train, no one else was in the car. It dropped me at the platform in the woods." He chewed his lip thoughtfully. "It's probably still there." He added, not sure if the information was useful, but perhaps these people could help him figure out what he was doing here and who he was. He had a name now at least, that was progress.

The floor creaked beside her as the boulder shifted closer to the window. Looking closer, Shiro realized it wasn’t a boulder at all but another man.

Pidge grabbed the boulder-man’s collar as he tried to slink awkwardly out through the window on two thick legs. “Hey! Where do you think you’re going?”

"Ah- I heard something outside and wanted to go see what it was. Yeah." This last voice completed the quartet, timid and small, incongruous with his physical form.

“Sorry,” Pidge tugged his shirt, indistinguishable from his skin and hair, all the colors of the sandy earth blended with texture to form a perfect camouflage.

Brushing Pidge off, the man stood, taller and twice as wide as Shiro with the muscle mass to match his girth.

"You wouldn't cut out on us with a fifth, Hunk, would you?" Keith asked, siding up beside him.

A low rumbling breath escaped Hunk’s pursed lips. “No.” He turned to Shiro. “You’re really here _alone_?”

“I don’t think he-” Keith started.

"Yes," Shiro answered the question himself.

Keith placed his hand on Shiro’s shoulder, still so cold to the touch. “New travelers always show up in groups of five.”

He glanced up, confused. Groups? Five?

“It’s how everyone begins their journey,” Pidge explained.

“Why five?” Shiro looked from her to Keith.

“Who knows,” Keith said flippantly, raising his shoulders slightly then dropping them again, letting his fingertips trail along the contour of Shiro’s shoulder as he pulled his hand away.

Hunk leveled him with a long, stony stare. "You do, Keith. The significance of the number represents the cycle of life. You don't move through the world on your own. You're born, you start to grow- to learn, you contribute to society, family, the people you care about, you grow wise and pass that wisdom down to those you mentor and protect. Then, in the end, or when it's your time, you die."

Keith dropped down beside Shiro, leaning back on his elbows and tilting his head up, meeting Shiro's eyes. He pressed his shoulder into Shiro's arm, seemingly oblivious and stretched his legs out before him. "They say that if you die here, the Dream will take your soul and everything you were and everything you are disappears into nothing. Your body awakens empty without you."

Lance hoisted himself up from the water, laying on his stomach, kicking streams of foam across the room. He reached out, cautiously, patting the back of Keith’s hand impatiently.

Keith took it.

"You're warm," Lance said, looking up at him and Shiro.

_No, he’s frozen._

Shiro let the thought go. “But,” he licked his lips. “You’re not a group of five.”

"No. We… failed." Pidge sank to the floor as if melding into it, wrapping the hem of her tunic around her legs like sheaves of bark. The map of her journey spread like dark, bare branches down each calf and over the tops of her feet.

“When you fail, if you’re still alive, you return here. To Threshold,” Keith explained.

“But there are _five_ of us now,” Hunk stressed. “We could be a team.”

“What would we do, though?” Shiro asked, still confused.

"We're all here to search for answers," Keith replied, side-eyeing Shiro and clearing his throat before he went on, "You just have to know what to ask."

“How did I get here. Where will I be when I wake up? Who am I? Can I ask that?”

Lance rolled his eyes. “You can try.” He twisted onto his side. “What Keith _really_ means is that you’ll get an answer, but it might not be the answer you thought you wanted.” He yawned.

“If we finish our quests, we can go home.” Keith looked around the room and stood up again. “I want to see the train.”

No one moved.

“It should be at the station,” Shiro said. If the train was their ticket out, why were they all content to stay here except for Keith?

“Can’t it wait until morning?” Lance asked, guarded, folding his arms over his chest and tucking his hands up into his armpits.

“No.” Keith shot back and cleared his throat again, only this time it sounded more like a smothered cough.

“If it’s there for us, it’s not like it’ll be going anywhere,” Pidge reasoned, chin on her knees, hugging her legs and rocking back and forth.

“Do you know where your body is? Or how long you’ve been here? I can't tell. Days? Weeks? It feels like years, yet nothing ever changes!” His voice cracked, and pivoted sharply on his heel and made for the worktable, gripping the edge for support.

Shiro leaned back, watching, wondering what exactly Keith was leaving out. 

Keith dug his nails into the wood, knuckles white from the tension. Without warning, he flung his arm across the surface, knocking everything off the tabletop. Inkpots splattered to the floor and across the wall in a rainbow of color that seeped into the wood, staining it a murky brown. The sheathed dagger fell with a thud, and papers rustled through the air like leaves. This time when the coughing started, he couldn't hide it, burying his face in the crook of his elbow. When he pulled away, dark blood pooled on the fabric of his shirt before disappearing completely.

Shiro knew he wasn’t supposed to see.

“What if there is nothing to go back to? My companions are gone,” Pidge said. “My home is probably destroyed. What’s the point of going back. Even if I die here, it’s better than being alone.”

“Yeah,” Hunk followed. “The raiders have probably destroyed my city by now. At least here we have each other.”

Lance sulked, chewing in his bottom lip.

Keith shuddered, his words hitching in his throat. “I don’t want to die here.”

Shiro said nothing, considering. Instinctively, he wanted to go home, but what was home and where was it? The notion that he had been brought here for a reason seemed ludicrous, but maybe-

“Everybody dies, Keith,” Lance finally said, dropping his arms to his sides. “Pidge, didn’t you once tell me your people were waiting for you to bring them renewal?”

She nodded curtly.

“And Hunk, you were looking for a new home, weren’t you?” Lance asked.

“Well, yes,” Hunk replied, scratching the back of his neck. “I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to check the train,” he added. “You know, just to make sure it’s actually there.”

“If it’s there,” Pidge said, “you know we’re not coming back here.”

Keith remained silent, his back still facing them as he stood, unmoving except for the slight rise and fall of his shoulders as he breathed. Quietly, the contents of the table righted itself, the ink welling on the surfaces of the wall and floor in brilliant color before streaming back into the pots and reassembling back upon the tabletop with the papers in tidy rows and stacks. He picked up the dagger, strapped the sheath to his belt then fashioned fingerless gloved around his hands. "All right," Keith turned toward them once more and offering Shiro a hand to help him up. "Let's go."

 

+++

 

Just as Pidge had suggested, when they arrived at the platform, the train waited on the track, the door to the car open, inviting them inside. An electric lamp hung from the contoured ceiling, casting its dim light over plush red velvet seating lining the single cabin, exactly as Shiro remembered.

They stood stock still before it. Pidge looked around, furtively, unwilling to make the first move. Hunk shifted his weight from one foot to the other.

"Well, I'm going," Keith announced, stepping inside and striding across the worn hardwood to throw himself onto a bench.

How many feet had tread that path before? How many times had he?

Shiro was about to ask, following after Pidge and Hunk, when Keith shot up from where he had just settled down.

“Where’s Lance?”

The whistle blew long and loud, filling the calm like a siren hailing the impending departure.

“I don’t know!” Pidge looked from Keith to the door.

Hunk shook his head. “He said he’d meet us here.”

Shiro raised his hand. “That was before he dove back under the water.”

Keith’s eyes grew wide. “He didn’t get here by land.” Without waiting for a reply, he bolted out of the car.

“What?” Shiro asked, once again confused, but no one heard him.

“The train won’t leave without five of us,” Pidge said. “That’s just not how it works.”

The whistle blew a second time, and the engine roared to life.

“I’m not so sure about that,” Hunk muttered under his breath.

Shiro went to the door, not sure what he could do to help.

“Lance! LANCE!” Keith yelled.

“Hey!” Lance called from somewhere out through the trees. “Over here!”

Keith sprinted along the gangway and into the woods. "Hang on!" The deep jewel-tone of his scarf following through the light-dappled leaves before the forest swallowed him up.

Moments later, he returned, crashing back through the foliage with Lance clinging to his neck dripping wet as they raced toward the train.

The whistle screamed impatiently. The door began to slide shut, and Hunk shoved Shiro aside, putting himself in its path, bracing it open against the invisible force.

“It can’t leave yet!” Pidge screamed. “The train never leaves without a full car!” She leaned out beneath Hunk’s arm, hands cupped to her mouth. “Hurry! The train is preparing to leave!”

Hunk grit his teeth, struggling against the door and Shiro came to his aid, adding his own weight and force to keep the door from slamming shut.

“We can’t be separated here!” Pidge yelled, eyes wide in fear. “Just get off the train!”

“No!” Keith shouted, breathing hard, pounding across the boardwalk. “Stay there, we can’t lose this opportunity!”

Lance whimpered, pressing his face into Keith's back.

“Come on!” Shiro yelled, leaving the door to Hunk as he leaned out, extending his hand. Clouds of steam puffed from the chimney and wafted back toward the car. He reached out to grab Keith’s hand, straining toward him as the locomotive began to move. With a final burst of speed, Keith jumped, grabbing Shiro’s wrist. Hunk caught all three of them, and as they tumbled inside, the doors slammed shut behind them.

Keith propped himself up on his elbows, panting with sweat dribbling down his face pale as the moonlight through the hazy windows of the car. He coughed and a spew of blood spattered across the floor before him. They stared at it, dark and viscous surface tension so high it sat like sputum on the floorboards before he recovered enough to will it away.

What was it Keith had said about the Dream?

Lance lay on the floor, his legs twisted unnaturally to one side, and shot a jet of water between his front teeth. “It’s cheating. The Dream knows just as well as the rest of us, you can’t go anywhere without me.”

“The train was definitely going to leave,” said Hunk.

Keith shot him a cutting glare. “Or was that what it wanted us to think?”

Shiro suspected that wasn’t his first thought, but he didn’t say anything.

Pidge shook her head. “I’m with Hunk on this one.”

“Well, we made it,” Keith conceded, pushing himself upright and unsteadily making his way to the bench beside Shiro. “I wonder where this will take us,” he murmured.

Shiro sighed. He still had so many questions, but where to even start. Did any of it even matter? This was all just a dream anyway, was it not?


	2. Pidge

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The first part of the journey.

“Once, the world was full of trees the like of which you’ve never seen. Imagine a trunk the breadth of a mountain and the crest of the crown in the realm of the clouds. Taproots grew to the core of the earth, the root systems like tributaries branching out through the rich soils of the continents, holding them together, pulling them apart. Staggered leaves on millions of branches filtered the sunlight and purified the poisoned air. Fresh water came to us as dew, collected from the massive furls of that foliage each morning, and in the evening we lay down in comfort, protected beneath.”

With the confidence of a storyteller, Pidge teased the yarn from her fingertips, constructing pictures with spidery thin growth in veins and vines that she collapsed between her hands and rebuilt themselves again with her wood and her sap. In the dawning light, she came slowly into focus. Each strand of her hair was comprised of tawny leaves. Bark-like crazing spread over her flesh. She leaned toward the sun and with her bare feet soaked up the puddle of water from where Lance had lain on the floor of the car.

“Are you a dryad?” Shiro asked.

“What’s a dryad?”

“A tree spirit,” at least he thought it was.

She shook her head.

As the minutes passed, the car took on a more organic form, branches grew and intertwined, creating a new cabin that devoured the old. Even the smell went from musty fabrics, coal, and metal to that of green wood and floral blooms. The glass had disappeared from the windows, and a membranous film like the delicate wings of locusts now stretched across each casing. Beside Shiro, Keith tapped at one with a grimy, ink-stained finger, then, without warning jabbed it through, shattering the chitinous material and smashing it out before the train worked its magic and built it back up again. Hunk lay across a bench beneath the window, basking in the warm filtered light. Pidge smiled and blew gently on a tiny sprig sprouting from the armrest beside her, calling it to life as the curl of leaves unfurled before their eyes.

Lance had heaved himself onto the bench beside Pidge and hadn’t moved, curled up there resting his head on her shoulder.

Shiro wondered why, even here, he couldn’t walk. He supposed it was one of the things Dream didn’t let him fix, or maybe he didn’t want to. Looking down at his own false arm, it worked fine, now that he had gotten used to it. He flexed his fingers and pressed his hands together, spotting a thin line of violet and silver peeking out from beneath his left cuff.

Pushing the sleeve up further, he examined the mark, a cartouche with his name and pathways branching out resembling wiring or circuitry moving through a fine mist. The path seemed unsettled, shifting around slightly as they passed along the tracks, and he wondered what it would look like when it was done.

“Keith?”

Fixed on the greenery outside the window as if he had never seen anything like it before, Keith hummed, tearing himself away to face Shiro.

Shiro traced his single path with one mirror-finger. “Tell me about your tattoos.”

Keith smothered a laugh, clearly not expecting the question. He pushed up the sleeves of his thin white shirt, his pathways glistening like Shiro’s as they carved through the images and designs inked on his skin. “What’s there to tell. There’s a difference between choosing to put something on yourself and something putting itself there. I feel like it’s taken my agency. I guess that’s kind of what Dream does. It guides you along and prompts a certain response.”

“What about the one on your leg?” Shiro pointed to Keith’s pant leg, black, fitted to him, slim and muscular, and tucked into his boots.

“I was hoping that maybe I could direct the course of my journey. You know, give Dream a little push, get us out of Threshold. You know that place doesn’t exist, right?”

Shiro stared, right into those deep, dark eyes.

_A place between._

“And,” Keith went on, “I guess it worked.”

“What do you mean?” Shiro didn’t see any blown up planets outside the windows, just a forest. He could feel the moisture that had crept in and see it in the mists that hugged the foliage, slowly burning off as the sun rose higher.

Keith grinned, the little stars across his cheek crinkling up as he did, the points of his sharp canines visible for a split second. “It brought me you.”

Those words brought strange comfort, and Shiro closed his eyes.

_Trees closed in overhead, sunlight slipping through the leafy boughs and dappling the fresh asphalt. No one else was on the road, a ribbon of black asphalt without markings. He shifted into second gear, urging the Corvette on, third, then fourth. For once in his life neglecting the speed limit signs. What was the point in having a fast car if he never got to have fun with it?_

_Top down, the wind whipped through his hair, and the mid-day warmth kissed his face. He twisted the knob to turn on the radio, and for the briefest moment, blinked._

His eyelids fluttered open, and he rubbed his eyes. He must have spaced out.

Beside him, Keith leaned into his shoulder, eyes closed, lips slightly parted breathing steadily.

The world outside flew by, but the scenery didn’t change, so much as shift. The wooded station of the Threshold seemed a far tamer version of what now grew outside the car. The trees, now less densely packed, reached heights Shiro had only ever heard of. Maybe they didn’t touch the clouds, but then, he couldn’t see the clouds to check. They stood in fairy rings, feeding off the husks of their fallen companions. The forest floor looked soft, brown with needles and leaves and was remarkably clear, without the scrubby brush of the younger grove.

Shiro glanced over at Pidge, hands and nose plastered to the window. “I think I know where we’re going,” she murmured.  As she stood, the train began to slow. Growth parted from a platform that had not been served in ages.

Exiting the car behind her, Shiro stepped through the rotten planks through to the spongy moss below, and a great weight fell over him, with a sense of crushing suffocation before he could he leap away to a more substantial part of the stage.With a deep breath, he carefully extracted each foot, one then the other, moving slowly away until he was free of whatever had tried to hold him there.

He stared at the holes where he had fallen through. “What was that?”

Pidge laughed. “It wasn’t ready for you.”

“Ready for me?” Shiro hadn’t found it funny.

She nodded.

Hunk gingerly shimmied around the broken wood, tiptoeing over islands of moss as he made his way off the platform.

Keith lay on his belly, just outside the door to their car, his face pressed into the tender green inhaling deeply, letting the sapor of the earth filling his nostrils.

Shiro almost laughed. He had heard of sailors making berth on solid ground after toil upon the sea and crusaders kissing the earth upon returning to their homes, he’d even seen a tree-hugger once or twice, the memories slowly coming back. Knowledge of his world came piecemeal, here and there, and all that he saw or did gave him a little bit more.

Keith rolled over and dug his shoulders in, scratching his own back against the wood like a wolf satiating an itch, “I’ve never seen so much green! Not like this.”

Pidge giggled.

“Hey!” Lance yelled from the car. “Are you going to leave me here?”

Sitting up, Keith brushed off his clothes. “Why don’t you stop being ridiculous and just come out of the train.”

Lance floated to the door like a specter, his tunic billowing as the air fought against him, legs dangling beneath him, arms slack against his sides.

Shiro stared, slackjawed.

The mossy green dried up to crispy brown as Lance passed. Droplets of water formed in his hair, trickled down his face, and were soaked up by the fabric of his shirt and pants.

“The green!” Pidge cried.

Lance fell, folding to the ground like a rag doll. “There’s not enough water.”

“Fine.” Keith got up and knelt, letting Lance climb onto his back.

Their friendship seemed a fateful occurrence of circumstance, borne more from necessity and less from a bond of mutual respect, but Keith did not complain, and when Lance smoothed down his hair, cheek to cheek, Shiro thought he smiled.

The four of them, Keith, Lance, Shiro, and Hunk followed Pidge into the overgrowth, denser now away from the tracks and the old growth eerily silent as they marched along. A path formed before her, knowing where she wanted to go, the earth beneath their feet dampening their footfalls. Even the wind, though it nipped at Shiro’s back, rustled no leaves. No creature scurried across their path, or chattered from the brush, no birds cawed. Save the trees and one another, they walked alone.

After a while, Shiro began to sense something new, a dull creaking, residual pain, long and drawn out, stretching from root to crown. He heard it in his head, like a subliminal line of thought, beckoning him, calling.

_“Help us!”_ they pled.

He wanted to, he just had to find them.

_Follow the voices._

Shiro kept on, listening as the din of their cries as they grew louder.

Something tugged at the back of his shirt, pulling against him. Bracing against it, he wrenched himself free, the hard rip of fabric so loud it echoed in his ears. Ropey vines suddenly wrapped around his waist and arms, but they weren’t from the trees.

_No._

The trees. He had to help the trees.

“Shiro!” Pidge warned, rooting herself to the ground as she tightened her grip.

He snapped his head around to her voice.

_Why?_

He struggled against her, desperate to go to them, but the more he moved, the thicker the branches holding him grew, now a tangle of thorns and long fingers pressing into his flesh, digging ever deeper the harder he tried.

“No!” she spoke, firm determination breaking his concentration and the spell.

Shiro relaxed back into her embrace, leaning on her, panting, suddenly aware of how unaware he was. Off the path, he had no sense of up or down of light or dark. Tethered to Pidge’s arms, grown distorted and long, like tentacles that refused to let him go. She led him back to the path, and when the ground again felt solid Pidge loosened her grip, drawing her excess growth back into herself.

A ring of perspiration dampened the neck of Shiro’s shirt and under his arms; beads of sweat prickled across his brow and dripped down the sides of his face in rivulets. Too worked up to fix it with Dream magic, the chilling wind sent shivers up his back.

Guttural screams broke the silence as Hunk crushed Keith to his chest, arms pinned down. Hunk held him there until the madness passed, suffering the wild thrashing.

Lance fell to the ground, palms hard against the sides of his head and whimpering as great dollops of water dribbled down around him to the hard-packed earth of their path. “Make it stop!” he sobbed, struggling to take great gulping breaths as he trembled. Shiro collapsed beside him, sucking in ragged breaths and exhaling loudly, trying to calm himself.

“It’s hardest for fauna. You hear the voices of the forest so loudly it becomes a madness. If you leave the path in here, there is no coming back. These colossuses are among the oldest lives on this earth, and they will feed on your meat and your blood if you let them. To create, you must destroy. It’s true for everyone, I think.” Pidge stared ahead toward a fork in the road and the great wide, fibrous trunk before them, reaching up into the shadowy canopy and beyond.   

Hunk let Keith go, and he fell to his knees between Lance and Shiro, swallowing hard, head against his hands.

“We came to save our people.” She scoffed at herself, pulling her toes out of the dirt and retracting her roots. “Blight and fire devastated our home, and so we came, chosen by the elders to enter Dream and seek out a solution. We made it this far, but I wasn’t ready. I wanted more time, to think through where we had been and where we were going and what the purpose of all this even was.”

Surrounding them, at the fork were the gnarled trunks of four small trees just off the path, limbs and twisted branches reaching out as if in recoil against some unseen adversary. With so much life, they stood starkly dead, their ashen bark cracked and wizened by the passage of time. Each one rose to a height barely reaching Shiro’s chest. He looked up at Pidge, getting to his feet and offering his hand to Keith, helping him up.

“These are your people, aren’t they?”

She nodded, lifting the hem of her tunic just above her left knee, revealing a circular mark denoting the finality of her path with a sigil of old growth and the dull browns of dried up soil. It stood proud on her skin like a brand, still shiny and raw. “This is for my negligence.” She released the garment, and it fell back over her legs. “I didn’t notice when my party left again, and I don’t think they meant to leave me, just scout the trail and return, but shortly after they left me to the silence of the wood, I heard the song like the dread keening of a beating heart.”

“I can hear it,” Keith interrupted. He stood and walked over to one of the small trees, arms at his sides. “It’s everywhere and nowhere.” He touched a branch and snapped it off, then crushed it in his hand. Dust from the rotten dry wood scattered through the air. “They succumbed to it just like we did.”

Pidge cringed.

Lance tensed. “It’s loud.”

Hunk walked to the great giant at the fork, looking around before placing his hands on the tree. Previously unaffected, he tentatively leaned in, pressing an ear to the trunk, his head bobbing slightly to a soundless rhythm. His expression of contentment shifted suddenly to one of great sadness.

“We have to leave,” he said, trembling as he tore himself away, warily eyeing the sentinel.

Shiro placed a hand on his shoulder.

“We need to go,” Hunk insisted, his voice a low whisper.

Shaking his head, Shiro sighed. “If I got this right, there’s a quest that every one of us needs to finish before we can go home. We’ll need to complete them.”

“The energy here is bad…” Hunk trailed off.

“They’re not supposed to be easy,” Keith said, following the trunk up to the lowest branches high above with his eyes.

Pidge shook her head, slipping her small hand into Hunk’s. “There’s something I need to do here, but I can’t do it alone.”

A dark fissure opened in the fibrous bark and she squeezed his hand before letting go. Climbing over the edge, she disappeared inside.

“Pidge!” Keith yelled.

“I’m here!” Her hand slipped back into the light, then she popped her head out. “Your eyes will adjust once you’re in, I think.”

“Don’t plants need light?” Keith muttered, heaving Lance onto his back and clambering in after Pidge vanished again.

“Not all plants,” Pidge replied.

“Yeah, but you do.” Lance buried his face in Keith’s shoulder as they vanished from view.

Shiro looked at Hunk, shrugged and followed. Over the rim of the opening, his foot landed on a soft bed of peat and needles, and as his eyes adjusted, a warm, golden glow filled the cavity. There was no single source, the light came from the wood itself, teeming with an excess of energy and life.

Noisily, Hunk came through behind him, and the opening sealed itself back up. He gulped.

“This way.” Pidge took them down a staircase grown of vines and branches, everything within as alive as the forest. She slid her hand along the banister of twisted ivy, leaves budding and unfurling at her touch. Tendrils and feelers extended from the walls, reaching for them, prodding, focusing mostly on Lance and sucking up the moisture he’d shed earlier, still collected in his hair and dotting his flesh like droplets of dew. 

“Ugh! Stop!” He tried to wave them off, lashing out wildly to keep them away.

“Lance! Not on the stairs!” Keith growled.

“This place won’t leave me alone!”

“Too bad, deal with it.”

Lance fashioned a flyswatter from his dreaming, made of a dead branch and woven blades of grass, to stave off the offending plant life.

They pressed on for what seemed like an eternity. The soft, faint song grew louder inside the trunk, keeping time as it sounded through the thin air. Shiro listened rapt to the hypnotic sound, ba-dum-dum, ba-dum-dum, trudging onward. It was like being off the path again. He could no longer tell which direction they traveled, down, or up, or if the spiral connected back to itself like some perilous Moebius strip.

“What happened?” Keith asked, daring to break the silence. “What made you turn back?”

“When I saw them turned into trees, I- it frightened me,” she admitted. “I heard it too, but it didn’t come after me the same way. I knew what it wanted immediately, like Hunk, and it made me sad.” She paused. “But I also know that none of this is real and so, I decided to quit.”

“It may not be ‘real,’ but that doesn’t mean it’s not dangerous.”

_If you die, you’re dead._

Shiro shuddered at the thought.

The winding stairs ended in a small alcove with a circular stage in the center illuminated by the mysterious inner light of the tree. When Shiro looked back the way they had come, no evidence of their arrival remained. They were here for the duration in an empty room in the hollow of a tree.

Pidge strode toward the center, her footfalls in time with the crescendoing beat as she came nearer. A green flame flickered to life, hovering over the center of the platform at the level of her shoulders. She watched it in awe from the edge of the platform, curling her fists into the folds of her tunic, hesitant but determined.

A wave of contentment and comforting warmth crashed into Shiro, and with its ebb he found himself drawn toward the light. Like a moth to the flame, he approached. Hunk followed, then Keith, setting Lance down beside him in the soft-packed debris.

Reaching out, Pidge cupped her hands below the flame; it licked at her fingers as she trailed them through the light unharmed. Hunk placed his hand on her wrist, a surge of golden energy flowed down from his palm to her hands, and the flames grew larger. Leaning against her, Lance reached up, and the wash of blue that flowed through made it bigger still.

Keith reached out cautiously, a deep violet-crimson sparking around Pidge’s wrist, arcing like electricity into the fire.

It pulsed with the heartbeat, the fire wrapping around itself, twisting and turning, writhing with the essence of something alive, suspended in a sphere above Pidge’s tiny hands.

At the last Shiro placed his left hand on her shoulder. A surge of cool white light shot down her arms to coil around the ball, encasing it in a shell that began to turn dark, rough and pitted. The glow, like a heart of molten metal, slowly died, and with a loud crack, the hard shell fell away as a small cone, opened from the heat of the fire dropped into Pidge’s waiting palms.

She brought it to her face, studying its scales, smooth and iridescent, reflecting brilliant color even in the dim light inside the great tree.

“That’s it!?” Keith asked, tilting his head to one side.

She dropped it in his hand to see.

“It’s-” he paused, eyes wide with surprise, “It’s alive! I can feel it!”

“May I?” Shiro asked.

Pidge nodded.

Keith pressed it into his hand, holding it there before he pulled away again.

Their eyes watched as he examined it, the seed shimmering and shifting like the pathways of their journey.

“What does it mean?” Shiro pushed it around, examining it from all sides.

They watched as the cone fell apart, leaving a pile of scales on Shiro’s palm.

Pidge cried out, grabbing at the seeds, but in her hands, they disintegrated, falling to dust through her fingers.

“All of that for wha-”

She cut off mid-sentence and was gone, suddenly not there where she had stood only a second before.

“PIDGE!” Hunk yelled.

Keith nearly jumped as the crackling yaw of fractured wood resounded through the chamber.

“Did you hear that?” Lance asked, eyes darting around, searching for the source.

“We have to go!” Hunk wrapped one great arm around Lance and hauled him up.

Transfixed, Keith stared at the place where Pidge had stood. Rooted in place, his head slightly bowed, shoulders slumped and arms at his sides. He opened his mouth as if to speak, but no words came out.

“I said, now!” Hunk urged, turning to look for an exit. The wall of close-knit vines parted, and the staircase reemerged, dry and crumbling as the entire trunk rocked in a nauseating sway.

Shiro grabbed Keith by the arm and ran.

Hunk took the steps two at a time with Lance fighting to hold on to him, each step bending and warping under his mass.

Shiro struggled to keep up, refusing to let go of Keith stumbling behind. Twigs and shards of dried out wood with curled brown leaves fell down around them as a fissure opened above with a thunderous clap. Light poured in, flooding the path as the tree folded in on itself. He glanced over his shoulder. Keith’s dark eyes widened as he snapped out of the trance-like state, and with a burst of speed, he sprinted forward, twisting his hand to lock his grip around Shiro’s wrist. Directly above them, a large branch fell through the opening. Behind, the steps scattered to dust. 

Before them the stairs crumbled.

Hunk grabbed Keith’s free arm to keep him from plummeting off the edge, but in doing so, yanked him off balance, and they all fell back into a maw of darkness.

Screaming.

Shiro couldn’t tell who it was, only that it wasn’t him. Time stalled out and they hung there suspended, unable to see through the pitchy dark.

And then, without warning, the freefall began.

Keith struggled to hold on, but Shiro felt his hand slip away.

“I got this.” Hunk said as they emerged through the ceiling of a rocky cavern. Moisture wept from the air and hung in clouds of mist. Lance gasped. The low lantern light illuminated pillars of limestone and fine veils of calcite. Stalagmites struggled to rise up from the ground and stalactites clung desperately overhead. Softly, they landed in the bed of a mining cart, Hunk first with Lance clinging on for dear life, Shiro followed, landing at the opposite end of the small cart right before Keith plummeted headlong into him.

They laid for a moment like the recently dead, winded from the impact. Two bodies, unmoving. Shiro couldn’t tell if it was the dream magic or not, but Keith was surprisingly light. This close, face-planted in Shiro’s breast, his messy hair had taken up all the freshness of the forest. He scrambled off, hands once again cold, despite a warm core.

Shiro groaned, his nostrils filling with the stale air and the scent of damp minerals and oxidized metals.

“Sorry,” Keith mumbled.

Shiro struggled to sit up. “Like you had any control over that.”

Lance and Hunk shared a look, brows raised.

Shiro shifted his gaze back to Keith, who had already turned away, gripping the side of the car away from the light source and hauling himself part way over the side.

With a retching heave, he threw up.

Shiro leaned over to rub Keith’s back.

“You all right?” he asked, not knowing if it was his place, yet unable to mask his concern.

“He’s fine,” Lance said, indignant, but this seemed less the irritable jealousy that he’d heard back at the cottage and more a proclamation, as if saying it out loud would make it true.

“We lost Pidge,” Keith said. “She was the last one to join us before Shiro arrived, and now she’s gone.”

“Do you think she went home?” Hunk asked.

“That’s how it’s supposed to work, right?” Lance spoke up. “I wonder if her question was answered.”

“She needed to find a way to save her home. She got a handful of seeds that turned to dust,” came Keith’s whispered response. “It’s just a dream, right?”

“Yeah,” Shiro answered, hesitant and still unsure of so many things.

With nothing more to say, Keith slipped back inside, pale and tired, sliding down to sit on the floor of the cart, not bothering to mend the cracks in his broken facade.

Lance let out an audible breath as he scanned the cavern, leaning back against Hunk at the opposite end of their transport. Shiro realized their cart sat parked at a platform similar to that of the threshold and the forest, only this one was made entirely from a single slab of polished stone.An old, corroded bell hung on a post beside their car opposite the lantern that gave them light. It rang, a sour note that echoed eerily through the cave system, far more extensive than what Shiro could see. The car began to move, slowly and surely forward, picking up speed.


	3. Hunk

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The second part of the journey.

The mining cart fled the light, and he could no longer see through the velvet dark. Shiro tried to stretch his cramped legs, but Keith sat in the way.

“I want to go back to the threshold,” Lance declared, a soft plea, distant and agitated.

No one replied.

The cart traveled on, rocking slightly along the rickety tracks, the clatter of the wheels sounding through the tunnel. Hunk seemed to know where they were headed, but Shiro hesitated to ask. At his feet, he felt Keith shift, then lightly tap his arm. “Move over. You’ll have more leg room.”

He slid to one side and leaned back against the end of the car. Keith crawled into the space beside him.

“We might be here a while.” Hunk spoke again. “I think we’re in the Balmeran Mine.”

Glimpses of brilliant color sparkled and shone, moving toward them from out of the murky dark like the ebb and flow of a tide, Drops of dazzling glow illuminated the passage briefly before receding back again. Shiro rubbed his eyes, blinking.

“It’s a living being.” Hunk answered his unspoken question. “We bring it sustenance, mostly minerals from our ancient forest that it can’t take from the caves, and we trade for these crystals. They power our city on the surface. We were using them to build a renewable energy grid, but haven’t been to get back to the mines since the raiders came.” He fell silent for a moment, considering. “We’re here now though. I guess anything goes in Dream.”

Hunk went on, “I was chosen by the Council of Elders to ascend to Dream with my four companions and locate a new home for our people.”

“At least you know how you got here.” Shiro sighed.

Keith sank deeper into the car beside him, ear pressed up against his shoulder as they bounced along, the cart rattling from the uneven tracks.

He closed his eyes.

_Someone stood in the middle of the road as he came speeding on, a stalwart figure, face hidden behind the hand held out in a gesture meant for him to stop. Too close, he was too close, but he slammed on the brake and downshifted desperate to avoid them. It was nothing but a rock jutting out from a bend in the road, but still, he'd been too slow. He jerked forward, his own momentum stopped short by his seatbelt, even as the windshield blew inward and his head snapped forward and back against the seat, and the fiberglass body of the car shattered like crystal with him still inside._

_Time slowed to a dead crawl. He squeezed his eyes shut as the safety glass hit his face, and a sharp pain impacted his arm._

“What’s your scar from?” Keith asked, so low, Shiro barely heard him over the rumble of the cart.

“Scar?” Aside from what he’d seen of his missing arm before making his new one, he didn’t have any notable scars.

“The one on your face.”

“I don’t-” He brought his hands to his face and remembered seeing it in the window reflection when he had arrived at Keith’s house in the threshold. He traced the long, shallow depression. “I- I don’t know,” he stammered.

How could he not remember?

Keith took his left hand and squeezed it, lacing their fingers together, a gesture of comfort, silently telling him it would be okay. All of this would be made right in the end.

But would it?

_What happened to me?_

A point of brilliant white light appeared ahead of them, cutting headlong through the dark and growing brighter as they approached the opening of the tunnel. Shiro cracked an eyelid, scanning the horizon as the car finally rolled through the opening. Here, the pale sky spread cloudless over the landscape, and from where he sat, he could see rounded peaks of distant hills on the approach.

Lance lay curled up in the center of the car, and Keith exhaled softly, slumped beside him. Hunk had sprawled out at the opposite end, all their limbs a tangle, resting, but not asleep. Shiro wondered why they should need to rest at all, a custom more likely than a necessity, but he _had_ been tired. Carefully, Shiro slipped his feet out from under Lance and freed his hand, gently nudging Keith aside so he could sit up. Twisting around he gazed upon this new world: a sparkling sea of sand and rock in earthern golds and grays, browns, and reds. Striations of color layered the soil upheaved by tectonic plates, pushed together, erupted into great ridges, and opened to deep chasms that tore the land apart and folded it back together again. Shiro imagined he had arrived on another planet, as if someone had taken his notion of a desert and worked it for millennia, sculpting it by hand with the teeth of the wind, molding the rolling monuments and soft curves that defined this sacred place.

_Sacred_ , he assumed.

Soundless, Keith joined him, resting his arms over the edge of the cart. “Where are we?”

“Isn’t it beautiful!” Hunk said, gazing over the rail, skin as smooth and reflective as polished stone in the sunlight.

Shiro stared at him in awe. “I get it! You’re a stone golem!”

Hunk made a face. “No, a golem is animated from clay; my people were born of the Earth herself. Forged in the magma of her core, so our legends say.” He pointed to something off in the distance. “Look! The forest! Isn’t it beautiful?”

Shiro scanned the landscape but couldn’t tell what Hunk was trying to show him. It looked to him like desert and more desert with rocky outcroppings here and there. “What am I looking for?” he asked.

“You’ll see.”

As the car took them closer, Keith gasped.

“Stop making so much noise!” Lance buried his head in his arms.

“Lance, get up, you’ve got to see this.” With one foot against Lance’s butt, Keith gently pushed.

Grumbling, he rose up on his knees and surveyed the landscape. “It’s all dry rocks,” he said, disappointment ripe with a sigh.

“Pidge would have hated this,” Keith whispered.

Lance glanced at him. “She would have wilted on the spot.”

“They’re petrified!” Shiro exclaimed.

Nodding excitedly, Hunk said, “I used to come out here all the time-”

A bell rang in the distance, and the brakes sang, metal on metal as the cart began to slow.

Hunk didn’t finish; he swallowed and licked his dry lips. When the mining cart came to a stop, he swung his legs over the side. A cloud of dust billowed up as he landed softly upon the silty earth.

Shiro opened a side door he hadn’t seen before and stepped out.

Keith let lance climb up on his back and followed. “So, what you’re saying is all these rocks used to be trees?

“What do you mean, used to be? These trees have ascended to a higher state!”

“They’re dead,” Keith said impassively.

Shiro picked up a small chunk of fossilized matter. Turning the fragment over in his hands, he studied the bleed of dark red to tawny brown and dusty ivory across the growth rings.

“Water, water nowhere.” Lance hung his arms limply over Keith’s shoulders. “I’m going to expire.”

“No, you won’t.” Keith adjusted his grip and turned to Hunk. “So, what do we do? You still haven’t told us that part, and I’d rather know before going in.” He frowned then added, “Not like last time.”

Hunk sat on a log of mineralized trunk. “Ah…” he trailed off, tilting his face to the sky where the silvery moon faced off against the sun in the high afternoon. They all watched him, waiting.

“The raiders came for our wealth, for the mine, imprisoning the Balmera inside and forcing us into hiding out on the desert plains. We tried to fight back, but they were stronger and more advanced than us. The simplest solution would be to move-”

“And let yourselves be bullied into leaving what was yours?” Keith wore an expression of unmasked horror. “That’s like giving up!”

Hunk shrugged. “We are one with the land. All the land. It does not matter to us if we are in one place or another. And so the Elders sent us out in search of a new home through Dream, as the journey would be quicker on the outside and potentially less risky. Or so they had thought.” He stood, and pointed to the west. “I should show you before I say more.”

Shiro looked to where he gestured but saw only waves of heat haze hanging over the barren sands. “What’s out there?”

“You’ll see.” Hunk replied.

“Is it far?” Lance asked.

Still staring into the distance, Hunk answered, “It will take the rest of the day.”

“Mmm.” Keith hummed, watching the sand swallow up the tracks beneath the mining cart, leaving it moored in the middle of a desert sea. “I guess we walk.”

Hunk took point. Shiro tracked their progress as best he could, but when the rolling hills of petrified trees disappeared into the dusty haze, he gave up. One foot in front of the other, they marched on. The sun never seemed to creep lower, beating down her golden light as she guided them. A radiant warmth trapped in the fine sand rolled up beneath their feet.

Sweat drenched Shiro’s hair, and the gritty dust of sandy dunes stuck to his face and hands, collected in the fabric of his shirt. He stopped, bending over with his hands gripped above his knees as he tried to catch his breath. “Hold up!”

The movement of their almost-caravan came to a halt. Keith hadn’t tried to pass Lance off yet, but his sleeves clung to his flesh, pale skin sparkling like islands between the dull sheen of his dreamscape path and his myriad tattoos. Lance panted at his back, a dead weight with a grayish film coating his body.

Hunk noted the discomfort. From a thread spun of the finest dust, he fashioned several scarves, woven of the arid landscape, thin and white to reflect the blistering sun, and passed them out.

“This should help.”

Lance tied his under his chin, the free end floating like a cape behind him. Keith pulled the fabric over his head and tucked it in place behind his ears to keep it in place. Not that it would go far if he lost it. Shiro held his own out from his face, immediately cooler for the shade. He tried not to complain, at least he carried nothing but the clothes on his back and his relatively empty mind.

Lance did little but whine and bemoan the lack of water.

“When are we going to be there?”

“Can’t we stop?”

“It’s too hot here!”

“I’m thirsty!”

“Hi Thirsty, I’m Shiro,” Shiro finally grumbled back, at the frayed out end of his tattered rope.

Lance glared at him and opened his mouth to speak when Keith started running, sprinting hard through the sweltering heat.

Before them a pocket of scraggly plants emerged from the sands, and as they drew closer a thin line of blue. Sun weary, Shiro’s heart leaped at the sight of the oasis. Surely, he imagined it, even as his logic brain cautioned him against believing.

_What if it’s just a mirage._

His lizard brain didn’t care to heed the warning, consumed by delirious thirst. He saw Keith racing toward it full tilt and followed after.

Skidding to the edge, Keith braced himself against the embankment as Lance threw himself bodily into the watering hole.

“Wait!” Hunk called after, catching up. “This wasn’t here before.”

Lance cupped his palm and clapped it against the surface of the spring, splashing him before descending below the surface, leaving only a trail of bubbles.

Keith dipped his head beneath the surface and whipped it out, shaking the droplets from his hair as they evaporated into fine mist and burned off in the air. “It’s here now.”

Shiro shrugged and stuck his chin in, letting the sweet elixir of life flow into his mouth. At that moment, he was sure he had never before tasted anything so fresh.

Hunk sat down at the water’s edge, tugging his boots off and sticking his toes in.

With an arc of spray, Lance reemerged and floated on his back. “This is the best place we’ve been yet.” He shot a spout of water into the air.

Keith sat slumped at the water’s edge. He glanced over at Hunk and fixed his gaze back to the surface of the water. “We’ve only been one other place so far. Besides, you’re only happy because there’s water.”

“Truuuuue,” Lance said.

Hunk swung his legs back up and stood. “We should keep going.”

Lance ducked below the surface again and swam toward them. “What if Hunk leaves like Pidge did? What happens then?”

“I’ll probably go home.” Hunk scratched his head.

“That means I’ll have to go home too.” Lance pushed himself just far enough out of the water to lay beside Keith, his legs still remained beneath the surface.

“I know.” Keith smoothed his hair, speaking softly and offering his hand.

Reluctantly, Lance took it and let Keith pull him out of the water.

“I can carry you for a while.” Hunk offered, pulling his boots back on and standing as he took Lance’s scarf and fashioned it into a sling.

“But I want-” Lance looked up at Keith’s face and stopped. “Thanks, Hunk.”

Shiro took Keith’s scarf and dipped it in the oasis before handing it back. He still felt like he was along for someone else’s ride, only supposedly this was his. Just what was he supposed to get out of it anyway?

And if this was a dream, why hadn’t he woken up yet?

Keith wrapped the scarf around himself, forcing a grateful smile though it didn’t last long.

Hunk looked worried, even as Lance settled in the sling against his back. “We should be out of the heat soon.”

They pressed on, only the shimmering surface and sub-picturesque palms never left Shiro’s field of vision. It remained at the periphery as the sun continued to trek across the blue expanse. He finally stopped. “I don’t think we’re going anywhere.”

Keith sat down where he stood, still wrapped tightly in his giant scarf, long since dried out again and dusty. “We haven’t left.”

Hunk turned around.

Shiro looked at each of his companions in turn, noting the way Lance kept licking his parched lips and glancing off toward the oasis.

_You’re not doing this, are you?_

Lance shook his head, and Shiro doubted it was Keith’s doing.

Was there something about the task Hunk didn’t want to share?

“Hunk,” Shiro finally said. “You don’t really want to show us what’s out there, do you?”

“Nope,” Keith answered for him, leaning back into the sand and covering his face with the cloth, smothering his cough. That was another problem. The longer they traveled, the worse Keith looked, and he looked sick.

“It’s just- I failed.”

“So did I,” Keith muttered through his rattling breath. “So did Lance. So did Pidge-”

“We didn’t even try to find her!” Lance shouted suddenly, pushing himself up using Hunk’s shoulders for leverage. He began to sound panicked. “What kind of horrible people are we that we didn’t even-”

“She literally disappeared, and then we fell through a hole in the ground into a living mine and landed in a cart that drove itself into a desert!” Shiro started, the aggravation he’d been feeling in combination with the heat bearing him down, escalating as he approached his wit’s end. He hadn’t asked for this, why was he even here? And why did he have to suffer the company of these strangers who couldn’t even manage themselves inside a stupid dream?

Patience. Be patient. You can figure this out.

_If anything, it’s your dream. Own it._

If precedent told him anything, he’d be on his way back to his own reality, just as soon as everyone else went home.

Home.

“We did help her, Lance.” Keith sat up, twisting the hem of the scarf around his hands, staring at Hunk, even as Lance shook his head. “We helped her go home.”

“You don’t know that,” Lance shot back under his breath.

“No, but it’s the only thing that makes sense. And if I stop believing that, then I’ll stop.”

Shiro studied his pained expression. “I have a hunch that if we quit here, right now, Dream would find a way to pick us up and move us to where we need to be like the pawns we are.”

Hunk raised a brow with steeled resolve and searching the distance, pointed off into the perilous expanse. “Don’t you think that’s just a little fatalistic? This way.”

Keith rose to his feet with a shrug and trudged after. Shiro took up the rear again, unconvinced that Keith was well enough to continue this journey, or that he would say anything if he weren’t. The endless march through the scorching earth grew tiresome, and Shiro felt gratitude for his dream-woven boots that didn’t melt in the sand despite how deeply his toes pressed into his softening soles. He was an ant, or some other such pest, a speck upon the barren land that did not belong, and no sooner had he formed these thoughts than the dreamscape folded in. The sun fell out of the sky, dropping below the horizon into the hazy hue of dusk. Before them rose a mountain range, the foothills like craggy piles of rock upheaved in sections of sheer verticals from the trembling ground in a storm of grit and clouds of dust.

Dropping to a knee, Hunk lowered Lance, covering him protectively. Keith froze, watching the turmoil as if he’d seen the sight before. A scattering of rubble spewed through the air, and Shiro tackled him, arm around his wait to pull him down. Shiro pulled his scarf over them as they waited it out and beneath his shirt, he felt the moist chill of a cold sweat.

They remained there through the turmoil and into the ensuing silence until Keith grabbed Shiro’s hand and pushed them up through the thin layer of sand.

“Hunk? Lance?”

Lance sat up in a pit of earth from which Hunk emerged after, his map of gold pulsating to life like veins of plasma. He turned toward the mountains.

A path emerged, carved through the rock cliffs, winding upward in serpentine twists and turns, but at the opening were two thin spires polished black. They reflected the moonlight to a pile of opaline stones between them, white as bones bleached beneath the desert sun.

Shiro clambered up and started toward it, but Keith held him back with a surprisingly firm grip, pointing to a white glow emanating from the bases of the tapering stones.

“Don’t!” Hunk warned, moving between them and the continuing path. “This is where I failed.” He pushed up the sleeve of his shirt to reveal his mark, nestled on his forearm just below the crook of his elbow. It looked like burning bones in the path of a beam from above.

It hadn’t hit him when he’d seen Pidge’s, but Shiro now shuddered at the thought of having a representation of something he’d failed to do emblazoned upon his body where he, and everyone else might be able to see it.

Unless of course, he covered it up.

Keith ran his thumb along the inside of his scarf then gestured to the bones with his free hand, the other still wrapped tightly around Shiro’s wrist. “These were your companions, weren’t they?”

Hunk nodded. “The earth took their lives, swallowed them up and burned them down to stone. We-” He hesitated and stared at his feet, digging into the sand with the toe of his boot.

Keith let Shiro go and went to Hunk in a show of solidarity, placing his slender hand upon one massive forearm.

“We were supposed to go together, but I just couldn’t do it.” His voice shook, and he clenched his jaw as he turned toward the spires, lifting his head.

“‘Only those who show valor in the face of true peril may pass this gate and ascend the-‘ I can’t read the rest.” Lance read the inscription blazing from the base of the left-most spire. He pulled his body across the rough sand to the second. “Something, something, ‘-is not what you think you seek.’” He traced the letters with a finger.

“Lance!” Hunk yelled, his voice in high alarm. “Don’t move!”

Instead of obeying, however, Lance narrowed his eyes and scooted back between the columns, into the beam of lunar white and through its bathing light as it grew ever brighter, even as Hunk ran toward him. One foot into the remains, then the other, shattering the precious stone and turning it to dust.

The white particulates spread through the air and hung there, like a billowing veil through which Shiro thought he could see the residual imprint of the past. Four figures, tall and broad as Hunk, approached together and when they crossed the threshold, the converging beam of moonlight concentrated through unseen lenses at the peaks, engulfed them in blinding light. They struggled to get away but remained in its tenaciously blistering hold. When Shiro could see again, they were gone and the night air crisp and clear.

Hunk collapsed to his knees at Lance’s feet. “What are you’re doing!”

“You must be very brave,” Lance whispered to his friend.

Hunk shook his head, throwing his arms around Lance. “You scared me.”

Shiro gestured for Keith to follow as he made his way toward the gateway. Lance and Hunk turned to stare at Shiro and Keith.

“Come on,” Lance gestured.

Why not?

Shiro lifted his shoulders and dropped them again with a quirk of his brow and a slight frown. He saw the inscription now up close, in characters that he could read, but the words were different from those Lance had spoken. _Only one of pure heart may prove his worth and pass._ What kind of person had he been? Shiro still could not form a concrete memory of himself, from his life before he came here other. There were glimpses and fragments out of context, things he knew but did not know how he knew them.

He pushed up his sleeve, thinking about how his map might have grown. It climbed up, around his bicep and disappeared beneath his shirt at the crest of his shoulder. He peeked beneath his collar, but the new spread told him nothing.

Here, the Dream presented him with a choice.

He stepped across the threshold.

Nothing happened. Shiro hadn’t even noticed that he’d been holding his breath, but he let it out with an exhausted heave and fell back against the cliff wall past the spires. Unaccustomed to the prolonged mental toll, he urged himself to keep it together, pull himself out of the swivet. Yet his manufactured arm flickered in and out until it left him completely, and though he told himself to focus and counted his breaths, he could not bring it back.

“Shiro?” Keith stood just across the invisible line connecting the spires, wan and tired.

“I’m fine.” He wasn’t, but he could pretend for a while, at least.

Keith was perceptive enough to take the hint, He rolled his head back from side to side and cracked his shoulder blades, stretching his arms above his head. “Well, I guess I’d better end this. Are you ready Hunk?”

Lance reached for Hunk’s hand and squeezed.

“It seems like an awful circuitous path I took just to get back here,” He laughed softly at himself, staring at the ground.

“You didn’t hesitate when you thought Lance might be in trouble.”

“I-”

Keith shook his head. “Don’t.”

He crossed the line, even as the light began to blaze white hot, just walked into it, bloodshot eyes and sharp fangs exposed. His lip curled, raw over gritted teeth as he stood against the beacon of old power. It burned through his boots, his gloves, his clothes, and the scarf around his neck, revealing a seal Shiro could not make out through the lapping flames. The fire consumed his pathways, sucking them dry as if birthing him anew.

“Keith!” Lance screamed, struggling toward him before Hunk came between them.

Shiro’s stomach churned as this dream took a turn into nightmare territory. From the other side, he stepped in and reached for his companion, but before he could make contact, Keith climbed free, the flames dripped from him in sizzling crackles of wraiths and whispers, his flesh oil-slick and gleaming like a beacon in the gloam.

“I-” he started, before his knees gave out and buckled beneath him.

Shiro caught him before he fell.

Hunk emptied his lungs, breathing loudly. “I thought we were going to lose you!”

“Keith would never let you fail, Hunk,” Lance said, rolling over on his back, feigning boredom, index finger toward the sky as he counted the stars beginning to appear.

Catching his breath, Keith forced himself to stand, slowly recreating his clothing as he did so, strips of fabric forming of seemingly nothing and wrapping around his limbs. He pointed to the spires. “It wasn’t them at all.”

Hunk nodded, one hand on Keith’s shoulder. “Believing in yourself wasn’t enough, you also had to believe in your worth.”

_Believe in your worth?_

Why would Keith be the one to struggle?

Shiro didn’t get the chance to ask. The earth began to rumble again, yet this time he felt light as if gravity had suddenly turned on its head, lifting his feet off the ground.

Up, into the air they rose. Lance twisted with a languid elegance so different from the awkward way he moved on land. Keith’s garments, half-formed, fluttered above him, as he clung desperately to Hunk’s wrists.

Hunk remained on the ground, his feet firmly planted, even as particles of sand jumped and scattered across the surface from the tremors below.

He smiled, the warmth alighting in his eyes speaking volumes more than he could have conveyed through words. Gently, he pried Keith’s hands off, one then the other, as the magic of Dream lifted him higher. Lance spun through it, like cutting through water, the folds of his shirt like great fins, his legs pressed tightly together pumped with a powerful force as he grabbed Keith then made for Shiro.

The higher Shiro rose, the denser the air, it filled his nose and his lungs until he couldn’t breathe and his sinuses burned. He fought against it, but it was like there was no air and instead, he was sucking in water.

_Water._

Before he could think, Lance grabbed him by the arm and swam fast through the wind, into the deep blue sky. The stars twinkled like thousands of pearls dotting the deep. Shiro clawed at his throat and his chest, feeling like his lungs would burst if he didn’t get air soon. He twisted and struggled, but Lance only held him tighter. When he glanced over, he saw the shimmering iridescent silvery blue of the hand around his bicep, a fine, diaphanous webbing between the fingers. Shiro followed the path of Lance’s dream markings up to his neck where bubbles clung to the vents of his gills. His hair matched the coloring of his skin, and scales like armor covered his long, powerful tail. The full path of his dream trailed from his hands and wrists, up the underside of his arms, down his sides and around his torso in a camouflaged pattern of spiraling currents or the curl of a breaking wave.

Tightly held in Lance’s other arm, Keith had given up his tattered rags, transforming himself into a pale red and iridescent black mer-creature. He slipped from Lance’s grasp, swimming strongly beside him, then cutting behind, face to face with Shiro’s dead stare.

“Gills!  Make yourself gills!” he urged, but if Shiro couldn’t even remake his arm, how could he possibly make gills.

“He’s not listening!” Lance said.

“Hold him!” Keith barked, unable to disguise his cough and the dark spew that came forth. Lance pulled back, slipping his arms under Shiro’s, forehead pressed to the back of his neck.

Shiro kicked out, even as Keith took the scarf Hunk had made and wound the corners of the fabric together. He dragged it through the water then blew into it as it slowly turned transparent and jelly-like, pulsing with the flow of the current, growing larger and larger until it became a giant bubble.

In a single motion, Keith jammed the apparatus over Shiro’s head, and with a mighty lurch, Shiro gasped for breath, hawking up the water in his lungs as the bubble siphoned it out.

In the distance, a whistle blew, the sound distorted through the water. “Come on, we don’t want to miss our train.” Lance took Shiro’s hand and swam on, humming a soft tune that wound itself around his fear and cut it off even as he found himself drifting along its melody.


	4. Lance

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The third part of the journey.

Far below the surface, the depths at first seemed dark and cold. The remaining three travelers glided along the ocean floor in a construct of shell and sand, fused together to form a dark cage, pushed onward by the current. A bioluminescent glow lit the interior for the comfort of its passengers.

Although he could only see a few feet out into the watery darkness, Shiro watched out the window as they passed through this strange new world. Attracted to the light, schools of fish followed alongside the car before seemingly losing interest and disappearing again. They entered tunnels of coral with tubers swaying and anemones spreading their feelers out like miniature starbursts unfurling. Blasts of air spewed forth from vents in the ocean floor. Resting his bubble on his arm, Shiro curled his hand beneath his chin.  

And closed his eyes.

_The crumpled shell had pinned his left arm, and he couldn’t move his right to pop the buckle on his safety belt. His car rolled headlong off the road with enough momentum to flip over the guardrail and slide down the steep hill between the trees toward the river roaring below. Powerless to free himself, he became an observer within the eye of his own spectacle as the car bounced along upside down. The heady, intoxicating aroma of gasoline leaked from the punctured tank, the scent of it giving him the burst of strength he needed to renew his efforts. Yet just as he did, the battered vehicle hit the water._

_He gasped and swallowed. The water stung as he breathed in, unable to get one last gulp of air. He thrashed his body and kicked his legs._

_He was drowning._

_You can’t die like this! Think!_

Shiro snapped to attention and shook his head as if that would help remove every last trace of the nightmare as he moved right into the next.

Their party of five was now down to three. Shiro reasoned that Pidge would probably have hated all the salt in the sea, but Hunk might have been okay with the change in scenery. He imagined them as thalassic counterparts. Pidge as an electric eel, perhaps, or some marine goddess with seaweed hair and Hunk as a great cetacean, stalwart and stoic. In reality, they were gone, and hopefully for the better.

The water cushioned it their car, giving the ride a smooth and comfortable buoyancy quite different from the bumpy rocking of the mining cart. Lance laid curled up near the center, floating there with his hands tucked neatly beneath his head. The winding pathways of his dreaming traveled over his body with a phosphorescent glow. The symbol of his previous journey’s end was placed at the base of his spine and depicted a pattern of diamonds or crisscrossed diagonal lines.

Keith sat on the floor slumped against the opposite side of the car, sullen, slowly flipping his fins, familiarizing himself with his mer-form, securing his belt around his hips. He’d managed to somehow hang onto his knife and the red scarf around his neck.

Shiro wished he’d been able to get a better look; it wasn’t his place to ask.

Pushing himself up, Keith swam to Shiro’s side.

“What were you dreaming about?” The water had changed his voice, distorted and softened where Lance’s became a siren song. He dragged his tail through the water, the thin, filmy flesh shot through with glowing red like channels of lava cutting through scorched earth, earth so blackened it shone green-blue in the ambient spectral glow.

“Water.”

Keith hummed. “That’s not all, is it?” He shifted, reaching out, but then stopped and clasped his hands in front of himself instead, adding, “You don’t have to tell me.”

“I was drowning.”

He frowned. “I wouldn’t let you drown.”

Shiro raised a brow and scoffed at the strange comment. “No, I mean, it was a memory. I was trapped underwater.”

“What happened next?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well,” Keith said, and this time took his hand, lacing their fingers together. “If it was real, you must have lived.” He squeezed.

“Why do you say that?”

“Because you can’t be here if you’re dead.”

The truth of that statement hit home, and Shiro slowly inched to the bottom of the car like a lead weight.

_Hook, line, and sinker._

“You’d better try to get some rest. You’ll need it.” Keith cracked his shoulders and closed his eyes. His head dipped down and rolled onto Shiro’s shoulder, a deliberate move as he made himself comfortable. He pulled Shiro’s hand to his heart, refusing to let go.

Not that Shiro would have allowed him to anyway. However long Keith had waited for the train, and Shiro understood that time to be long, he still went through the motions of living. Keith yearned for it, for connection and touch, and yet despite being among others, he seemed closed off and alone.

Shiro wondered when he had last felt such comfort. From whom had it come? He tried not to think about it as he leaned back into a bed of buoyant jellies, their stinging tentacles tucked beneath their canopies. Keith nestled in beside him, the oversized fins of his illusory tail gently billowing with the motion of the car. His hair floated free, silken smooth against Shiro’s cheek.

_I hardly know you and yet here we are._

Shiro did not doubt Keith’s earlier statement, confident that both Keith and Lance would do their best to make sure everyone continued on as expected. Here they would face Lance’s challenge. By that logic, the next would be Keith’s. Did that mean his trial would be last, and that he’d have to go it alone?

The thought terrified him. What demons would his dream create?

Maybe he just wasn’t dead _yet_.

He awoke to the sound of a muffled cough. A shimmering bluish fin swiped him in the face as Lance sat up from where he’d wedged himself in between Keith and Shiro.

“Keith?” Lance asked.

Pushing his hair out of his eyes, Keith turned away, coughing again, a deep, penetrating sound that ripped through the cabin. Amplified by the water, it rang in Shiro’s ears and kept on ringing.

“Shhh,” Lance soothed, wrapping Keith in his long, thin arms, humming a low tune to soften the noise.

Keith turned back around. A dribble of blood crawled down his chin, already beginning to dissipate before he wiped his face with the back of his hand.

“I’m sorry,” he said, acknowledging Shiro’s blatant stare.

“Can’t you do something!” he stopped himself short. By this time, he knew how things worked here; he still hadn’t been able to replace his missing arm. Whatever was wrong with Keith probably couldn’t be fixed easily either. “I just don’t like seeing you like this,” he admitted.

Keith slipped away from Lance with a few quick lashes of his tail. “It’s fine. I’m fine. It’s just,” he paused. “I’ve been away from my body too long.”

“But-”

Lance cut Shiro off, clasping both hands over his mouth.

He got the message.

Cautiously, Lance peeled his hands away. “We’ll be arriving soon.”

“How can you tell?” Keith asked, staring out a window.

“We’re approaching the trench. Feel the heat?”

Keith shook his head.

Shiro felt it though. “I do.”

Gesturing for Shiro to come and look, Keith stared out the window. The visible landscape widened as they approached a great reef. More life brought with it greater light and color. With their passage came the city, slowly building on the structures in place. Corals grew upward in spindles, rising up to impart the city with a lean architecture with narrow archways and towering height. A penetrating luminescence radiated from the tallest, central peak, the beacon like a lighthouse, but whether it welcomed them or not remained to be seen. Tiny fishes swam along, winding their way in and out of the multiple structures. Rays skirted the sandy sea floor, the glassy dust glistened in the light before settling again. Sea stars and suckered tentacle beasts clung to windows, puzzled together from paper-fine layers of mother of pearl. Ocean flora swayed with the current, and crustaceans emerged from hiding spots in the sandy floor to watch them as they passed.

The car finally slowed, and when it came to a stop, Lance swam out to the platform, twisting and turning, fanning his shimmering fins like a betta fish at its own reflection. Without warning, Keith took Shiro’s hand and pulled him along. The platform itself was a bed of sponges and marine flora in a host of color. Shiro spread his toes, unable to recall when or how he’d lost his boots but found he did not care, and let himself sink into the floor, watching as thousands of tiny bubbles emerged around him, catching the silver-white light and reminding him of stardust. Only now did Shiro realize that the buildings were covered in barnacles and shells and old organic debris built upon. These buildings were different from the smaller ones he’d seen coming in, monumental in geometry and distinct proportion. He followed the lines of massive columns up to capitals, where, on one he could just make out a design of feathered wings, an oddity for something nestled in the very depths of the Earth’s crust.

“What is this place?” he asked.

Keith pointed up, to the architrave above them.

The sediment of ages broke away, falling slowly through the water to their feet, revealing carved Greek letters that crumpled and twisted to form words in a language Shiro could read. “‘The Island of Atlas.’ What’s the Island of Atla- Oh.”

Keith nodded.

Shiro turned to Lance. “This is Atlantis? As in the lost city of Atlantis?”

“Oh no,” Lance waved a hand dismissively, speaking into the darkened building. “It’s never been lost. We’ve always known where it was. It’s here. It’s me.”

“It’s you?” Shiro found himself confused by the statement. What could Lance possibly mean?

“He doesn’t have a name.” Keith looked upward, taking in the expanse. “His are the people of this place. Atlantis-Lantis-Lance. I just needed something to call him.”

“I like Lance, though.” Lance offered as he flitted away into the darkness.

Shiro glanced at Keith, who threw up his hands and shrugged before taking off after Lance.

They followed the trail of bubbles through narrow corridors, down staircases, built all the buildings connected through paths and long halls. Mosaics and murals remained eerily preserved, unaffected by the ravages of time as if Chronos himself had stalled it out when the ice caps melted and the blueness of the planet devoured the land, sinking the city. They swam through rooms of treasure hoards, swaths of golden objects and jewels, valuable things that people might enjoy. While Keith occasionally paused to urge Shiro along, none of it appeared to interest Lance.

At least it didn’t until they entered the next long room. The bright aqua glow coursing down and around Lance’s limbs in the darkness gave him the look of a spectral being. After several seconds, he was joined by another like himself, then another. He stopped, coiled back and approached the first in a greeting Shiro did not understand, with gestures and arcs of blown bubbles in a tinkling ebullience that fell on deaf ears to the marble floor with the slow crash of stone through water.

Lance bared his teeth, row upon row of sharp ridges as his lips curled back and a low growl came forth from somewhere deep within.

The silent antagonist mimicked his movements, puffing his chest when Lance did and unfurling his fins the same in a choreographed display of intimidation. When Lance spun around, so did he the same, and every incarnation in the infinity wall behind.

Suddenly, Lance burst into a fit of giggles, doubling over and clutching at his stomach. “It’s me! Look!”

He flared his fins, and every reflection did the same; he couldn’t stop laughing, eyes squeezed together in mirth.

Dampening the light emanating from his pathways, Keith crept up behind Lance, circling with each turn and keeping to the flows of current. He paused just long enough to tap Lance on the shoulder. As soon as Lance turned, Keith contorted his face to grimacing rage, hands up and curled like the gnarled branches of a sea fan, his own fins spread wide as he menacingly hissed.

Lance shrieked.

Keith bent double in peals of laughter.

“I hate you!” Lance huffed.

Clearing his throat, but failing at keeping a straight face, bubbles trailing from Keith’s nose. “No, you don’t.”

Lance released a vent of air from his gills, flicking his tail in agitation.

Shiro tried unsuccessfully to smother his own grunts of amusement until Lance shot him a glare that shut him immediately up.

“Come on! You were being ridiculous!” Keith continued.

“Yeah, well how was I supposed to know there were mirrors here.” Lance looked at the walls again, admiring his reflection.  

“Don’t you know where we’re going?” Shiro paddled slowly over to them.

“We’re going down.”

“Yes, we get that,” Keith began, “but where to, exactly? You do know how to get to wherever it is you’re taking us?”

Lance stared at him, one long, hard look, then took off again. Once more, Keith took Shiro’s hand and pulled him along behind.

“Some think the ocean is safe. Down here, in the thermal fissure, warmed by magma beneath the crust, we were protected, and we lived in harmony with the creatures of the deep. The reality is, it’s not.” He slowed his pace, giving Keith and Shiro time to catch up. “We’re going to the shelter.”

“Shelter?” Shiro panted, kicking his legs to help Keith, though it didn’t seem to make a difference. He still couldn’t re-invent his arm, and if he couldn’t do that, he certainly couldn’t turn himself into a merman.

“Well, technically, I suppose it’s now a lair. The current tenant doesn’t go out much.” Lance stopped talking.

Shiro gave up and allowed himself to be pulled along. He could hardly see in the darkness, and the deeper they traveled, the harder it was for him to keep track of where he was. Since the mirrored hall, Keith kept the light of his pathways deliberately dim, and Lance regularly swam away only to circle back minutes later for them to catch up.

Why was he still even there? It occurred to him he might have fabricated this entire place, Dream, his companions, all of it, but there was no feeling of familiarity, of someone from his waking life meeting him part way in the strange labyrinth of his mind. This place reflected that, the neverending building that might have been bigger on the inside than it was on the outside with room after room of things that held no meaning, much like himself, unmemorable, unimportant. He hated this helplessness, it was that way with almost everything in his life, paths barred to him because of one thing or another.

He recognized the overwhelming feeling creeping over him, the anxiety of knowing what was going to happen but being unable to stop it as memories began to fall into place. He glanced at the stump of his arm but couldn’t see it. All for the better, Shiro supposed; that arm had given him trouble all his adult life. His younger self had often wished it away, along with muscular dystrophy, acne, and the expectation that he was particularly gifted at math and science because of his undeniable Asian face. He was, in fact, quite good at those things, not that it mattered here, and his acne had cleared up with some help from a dermatologist, but the arm had continued to plague him, and it had kept growing worse.

Eventually, it would probably kill him, The muscles in his chest and shoulders would weaken, including his heart, the most critical muscle in his body. Without the means to keep his heart going, he would die.

His mother would tell him to stop being morbid, but the finite inevitability of it was a torch he carried, even doused and stuffed into the bottom of his briefcase sitting on the seat beside him every morning on his drive to work.

Even with the symbolic inconvenience of his arm, he would rather have it than not, and with a concentrated effort, he fashioned it anew, clear as glass and with a fine webbing between each finger to propel himself along.

With a great heave, he kicked and paddled, but he still lagged behind Keith as they raced to catch up to Lance.

Down, down, and through passages out and away from the city center they traveled until the path was no longer a fabricated construction, but a natural formation, that grew massive and cavernous, like a great gaping maw to swallow them up. Stopping to catch his breath again, Shiro took the time to look around. This must have been where it happened. Whatever _it_ was.

Lance slowed his pace, darting over to the wall. “We have to keep going,” he said, matter-of-fact, his face a grim mask of resignation.

A trail of bubbles from somewhere inside the inky blackness streamed out overhead. Lance drew in his fins, no longer trailing like plumage surrounding his lean form, and toned down the phosphorescent light of his iridescent scales. He motioned for Shiro and Keith to follow, and keeping a low profile, he glided inside, swimming close to the wall and the sandy ocean floor. He slipped into a tight passage, bound by the side of the cavern and a crude retaining wall with a vaulted ceiling overhead. Openings between the old stones let in the opposing current, creating eddies of warmth water circling in and mixing with the chilly water of the tunnel.

“Here,” Keith whispered, pulling Shiro’s arm over and around his neck before taking both hands tightly in his own. “It’s too narrow. On my back.”

“But aren’t you-”

“I’m fine.”

Shiro opened his mouth to retort, but recognized the tone all too well and instead said nothing. Together, they entered the tunnel and took off after Lance. Fast and strong, Keith steered with his shoulders gliding along in Lance’s wake.

Pressing his face against Keith’s back, Shiro settled comfortably into the continued closeness. His air bubble cushioned him against the motion of the journey, yet at the same time, he wished he could feel that skin against his cheek or catch the scent of Keith’s long, pitchy hair that trapped all light like a void in space.

That’s where he’d be going next. He knew it from the constellations, the red light still weakly glowing from the pathways over Keith’s skin. He could make out the end, hidden beneath the scarf around Keith’s neck. He’d seen everyone else’s marks of failure, so why was Keith’s particularly secret.

The bubbles still trailed here, larger, siphoned along by the growing heat. Nearby, something rumbled, a thunderous rolling noise, and up ahead, Lance pulled to an abrupt stop, turning toward them.

He motioned down with both hands, and Keith swam lower, gliding across the cavern floor, dousing the light coursing over his body.

Keith squeezed Shiro’s hands, lacing their fingers together for a better grip. Shortly, up ahead, they rounded a bend, and suddenly the water came alive. Glints and glimmers of bioluminescent light sprinkled around like millions of tiny stars laid out before them. The tunnel opened up to a larger passage, more vibrantly lit the closer they swam. All of the light came from scales in thousands, millions or more littering the ground, floating in the calm waters, pooling together from the current, then blasting apart as Lance swam through. Skeletal remains of merfolk at least half again Lance’s size lay scattered about, arms, tails, pieces here and there, their bones chomped and ravaged as if mowed through, almost as if they’d been eaten alive.

“Lance?” Keith asked, releasing Shiro as he made for the bones.

“It’s not a graveyard,” Lance said, floating in the midst of the twinkling lights. “It’s a prison.”

“They’re all so big.” Keith murmured, examining the skeletons, face to face with a skull perched still upon its spine, dug into the sand, its mouth, full of tiny fangs, closed in a permanent grimace.

“I can’t help that I’m small!” Lance cried out loud and anguished, the words hitching in his throat and causing his voice to crack in a high-pitched whine that echoed through the room and rest of the cavernous tunnel. Cringing, he covered his mouth, eyes wide and brows furrowed in concern.

The earth began to shake. Shiro felt it through the water in waves where the scales of light fluttered like motes of dust through the air.

Lance dashed erratically from one side of the room to the other, back to where they had come, and then brushed against Shiro as he made for the opposite end, buried in shadow. “Come!” he hissed, before disappearing with a flick of his tail.

Keith grabbed Shiro and followed.

This tunnel was even narrower than the one they had come through. Shiro pressed his face as hard as he could against Keith’s back, occasionally feeling the bump of the rocky ceiling graze his impermeable bubble. From behind them, the quaking grew louder.

“It knows we’re here,” Lance yelled, the lines of his pathway over his skin beginning to glow again. “ Hurry!”

“It?” Keith asked, giving his all with a burst of speed, staying on Lance’s tail with Shiro clinging tight.

Before Lance could reply, they emerged in another chamber with a large opening to the deeper cavernous spaces. Skirting the edges for any sign of an exit, there was nowhere to hide except a pile of rubble.

The rumbling grew louder, chunks of rock dislodged from the ceiling, falling hard to the floor.

“I can smell it. What is it?” Keith left with a twist of his tail, heading away toward the mouth of the chamber. “Can’t we just go back the way we came?”

Lance shook his head. “It’ll meet us at the entrance. This same thing happened last time! I don’t know what to do!” He went back to swimming circles around the room, caught up in the rhythm of something familiar.

Shiro saw it first, the glint of a reflection in the distance, shifting left to right as it approached like some dread harbinger. “Uh, guys?”

Before he knew what was upon him, rows of serrated teeth grimaced at him and nearly grazed him as they moved swiftly past, a single glassy eye staring him down. The creature, a megalodon, opened its jaws. Water rushed into its mouth and Shiro with it, paddling furiously with cupped hands against the back-pull of the current.

“Shiro!” Keith yelled, cutting toward him, as the massive predator followed.

Shiro pivoted hard and made for him. Tearing through the water, Keith grabbed his arm, yanking him upward.

Keith’s gills trembled with a smattering of air as he flashed his fins in a burst of reflected light at the creature’s eye before propelling them onward, avoiding swipes of its massive tail, and the power of its quick turns as it followed them.

The enormous jaws, wider than Shiro was tall, clapped shut again at his heels. He looked back at Lance, watching horror-stricken before turning to the rubble pile. Clearing the debris, Lance tugged at the larger rocks and boulders wedged in place.

Keith darted behind the head of the giant shark, doing his best to hold its attention and keep pace with it as it thrashed about, searching for them. “Lance, we could use a little help here!”

Shiro struggled, pulled around like a rag doll, before finding a break in the dance to grab Keith’s waist and hold tight. He realized what was happening. “It’s closing in! It’s pushing us back, so we have nowhere to go.” He looked for the tunnel through which they had entered, but it was no longer in sight, somewhere behind the giant shark.

Keith cursed under his breath. “Help him,” he commanded, shaking Shiro off on the shark’s blind side before catching the creature’s attention again, skirting the periphery of its field of vision.

The stones sealed an entrance to another small tunnel, just as dark as the ones they’d already traveled, maybe darker, if that were even possible.

Lance grit his teeth, tugging at the last stone covering what looked to be a small tunnel. 

Shiro helped him shift it aside then followed him in.

“Keith!” Lance yelled.

The red and violet light from Keith’s stellar pathways blazed from his pale flesh, the reflected light shifting like flames in the water. He had the predator’s attention, but this last breath of energy waned quickly, and he hung there suspended in the eerie light. Resignation and fatigue painted his features, but only briefly before he buried it with acceptance and resolve, unsheathing the dagger from his belt.

“No!” Lance cried, rocketing from his hiding spot to shove Keith aside and take his place.

Keith struggled to right himself, even as the jaws snapped shut, frozen by the first note of resolve, as the siren opened his mouth.

The notes of Lance’s haunting song filled the cavern, calm and soothing, echoing off the walls.

In suspended repose, the shark ceased all movement, and never ceasing his strange melody, Lance swam slowly over to Keith. Frozen in place by the same enchantment, Keith’s knife dropped to the floor, and he floated transfixed, eyes on the creature before him as if he could see nothing else.

Still singing, Lance hauled his friend over to the tunnel, gesturing for Shiro to get them both inside. He followed up behind, pulling the rocks back in place over the entrance, though the megalodon wouldn’t have been able to reach them anyway.

They left in silence, Shiro clinging to Lance, hands clasped around his neck as he pulled Keith quietly along.

“I think it’s over,” Lance finally said, illuminating the tunnel with his brilliant blue light. “You know, when you’re small and surrounded by the strength of titans, you don’t always think you have anything to give of yourself, I guess.” He laughed, but the laughter soon turned to wracking sobs. “It’s just not fair! My companions died in that room. It should have been me! Why wasn’t it me!”

Shiro had no answers, but when he thought about it now, Lance’s mark very much resembled a net, representing the feelings of being trapped, weak, and insecure. Despite that, Lance had been the one to survive.

“Don’t be so hard on yourself,” Keith spoke weakly; Shiro could only see his head bobbing as they pressed on.

“Our city was dead before we entered the Dreaming. Sulfur contaminated our water from fissures in the earth. Those of us who didn’t leave perished. We came here thinking that if we could figure out how to stop it, we might be able to do something, anything to reverse the damage. The acid is hard on the structures though. Our statues have no faces, the great spires of our city were gone in cycles. We are nothing more than a naive people with foolish dreams.” Lance trembled. “I just thought that if we could change the fate of our city in our dreams, we could change the path of our destiny in the present.”

“I-” Keith hesitated. “I don’t believe it works that way.”

“I know that now.” His voice fell hollow and melancholic.

“I didn’t mean-” Keith tried again.

“I know.”

“So, Shiro began, “those bones we saw, that was your team.” The revelation made Lance’s aloofness, and his attitude of ignoring the things that hurt make more sense, the way he made himself physically close to others, squeezing himself in, even complaining with real or fake jealousy about the attention he wasn’t getting.

Lance let the silence speak for him.

“And,” Shiro went on, “you don’t know-“ The tunnel shook, cutting him short. A loud crack reverberated through the water. Shiro heard it at the same time as he, Lance, and Keith were hurled into the side of the rock. Millennia had worked the tunnel smooth, but his hip, back, then head cracked against it with unexpected force. From behind them, the pressure began to build, and the current pushed through with greater force than before.

Never faltering or loosening his hold, Lance pulled Keith closer, and with what strength he could muster through the churning water, took Shiro’s hand and placed it in Keith’s.

“Whatever you do, don’t lose each other!” He flickered in and out, fighting the turbulent strength of the sea and the dream that wanted him to leave.

_It isn’t real._ Shiro tried to remind himself, but it felt real. He could barely move his limbs but refused to let go, one arm still tight over Lance’s neck. He reached for Keith with his other hand, the good one, the one that wouldn’t disappear.

The force of the blast spewed them out into a vast crater in the ocean floor, as one final blink spirited Lance away. Floating downward, Keith pulled them upright with a reserve of strength Shiro hadn’t expected. Stacks of steam burbled up over the surface, and looking up, many smaller tunnels, old lava flues, forced their contents into this cauldron. Shiro held Keith tighter, digging into his wrist as they simultaneously looked down toward the ocean floor.

From their current height, they saw the city of Atlantis within the caldera of an ancient volcano, and from the sound and the tumultuous currents surrounding them, lifting them up again and again, even as the thought solidified in Shiro’s mind, that volcano was about ready to burst.

At his feet, the water began to warm. Keith swam hard, dragging Shiro up with him toward the dappling of light through the water. Somewhere up there, the sun shone down as Keith paddled and struggled onward, but it wasn’t enough to break out of the current’s strong grip. Keith stopped fighting.

_Whatever you do, don’t let go._

And then the current shifted. The ocean carried them upward on steam and the thrust of magma. Even as they burst from the water and into the air, the debris and the lava kept coming, forming something behind them like a casement. At their feet, it continued to build itself as if on an invisible matrix, blinding light at the growing edge until a new train car formed, silver-white from the salty sea.

They slammed into the rear window of the car. Shiro’s bubble burst, hanging around his neck like a scarf once again. He watched the world grow smaller beneath him as he crouched on the glass. A calming blue light edged the smooth surfaces of the white interior accented in black and grays. As the car righted itself, Shiro sank into one of the seats, large enough to accommodate him and pleasantly firm, sculpted to his physique. The chairs had harnesses, but he didn’t use it. When he put one foot down upon the floor, it conformed to him with just a little give, and he spread his toes out, pressing the ball of his foot in and lifting it up to check the impression.

Outside, the blue-blue planet with very little green became smaller. Shiro expected it to disappear, but instead, it broke apart as if something very large and invisible had crashed into it, and that impact had stalled out, exposing the core, but not completely destroying it. Half of the planet remained, with islands of rock, like asteroids suspended and held in place by the planet’s gravity following it in its course around the sun.

Before his eyes, the water evaporated, and the land dried up, exposing a brown encrusted scape where no life could surely remain. Keith had already shrugged off his fish-form, and stared at Shiro, cold and hard. He pushed himself up, back against the shuttle door, unchanged, except for perhaps the slight points to his ears, the yellow cast to his eyes, and the faint markings, like a stripe pattern arcing up each cheek.

Sighing, Keith joined Shiro at the back of the car, kneeling on the vinyl seat cushion and resting his elbows at the base of the window casement. He traced the perimeter of the glass and tapped it with a fingernail. The sound rang, cutting the silence.

“Dream quartz. You know why they make the window corners rounded, right?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “If they’re square, stresses develop from the hard angles, eventually causing the craft to break apart in flight.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“But you have space travel where you’re from. I can tell. You’re in awe but not scared of it. Maybe you’ve seen pictures from space, I’m not sure you’ve been.” Keith studied him for a moment.

Shiro tried to smile, but all he felt was emptiness.

Keith looked away. “And now we are two,” he said, putting his voice to the thought on both their minds.


	5. Keith

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The fourth part of the journey.

Keith didn’t look at him. He sat there staring straight ahead, and if he stared any harder, Shiro was sure he would have burned a hole in the side of the shuttle. A sleek suit of velvet midnight clung to his figure like a wetsuit from his feet to his neck, accentuating every visible nook and cranny of his athletic physique. A carapace of armor fit over it, offering more substantial protection to the softer parts of his body, his neck, stomach, abdomen, groin. A sturdy utility belt rested just above his hips, and the dagger that Shiro had thought lost to the megalodon’s lair was sheathed and strapped to his thigh. Beside him on the bench sat a full-face helmet.

“You’re still soaked,” he said, absently.

“No, I’m-” Shiro shifted in his seat, the faux leather squealed beneath him, and when he wriggled his toes, they squeaked against the floor. “How could you tell anyway!”

Keith turned around to face him, a slight smirk twitching at the corner of his mouth. “Because I can see your reflection. You’re dripping.”

He was not wrong. Water still collected at the hem of Shiro’s pants and pooled at the cuffs of his shirt. Keith tugged the glove off his right hand and pulled a towel from the air and tossed it to Shiro. More intensely than he had the wall, Keith watched Shiro peel the shirt over his head and towel off.

“Do you have to?”

“What?” Keith didn’t blink.

Not that it mattered; there was, after all, something flattering about it. Besides, it wasn’t like a visual undressing. Shiro was actually doing it. This show was all him.

“Stare? I mean, it’s okay if you do, I guess, it’s just…” Shiro looked down at himself, broad with ample bulk and presently _dewy_. His pathway now climbed down the left side of his chest, over his abdomen only to creep down his pants and disappear. He traced his name with one of his false fingers, realizing the hand was still webbed from their ocean trek and changed it back. He hoped Lance was all right, wherever he’d disappeared to.

Keith’s pressed his fist against a tight smile, one brow raised. “You do realize you don’t have to strip, right? Just imagine yourself in a nice space-suit, I mean. I get it, you’ve worn the same thing since you got here, but it’s just a dream.”

Shiro laughed at himself. “Like life and love.”

Closing his eyes and shaking his head, Keith smiled. “Something like that. But still, I don’t mind.”

“I can tell, you’re looking at me like I’m the best meal you’ve never eaten.”

“You might be,” Keith answered never breaking eye contact.

Shiro couldn’t tell if he was teasing or not.

The toes of Keith’s boots barely touched the ground. He gripped the seat cushion, the side of his hand cold where it brushed against Shiro’s, and swung his feet. “It’s just us now,” Keith spoke with the strain of someone who wanted to believe that speaking a truth aloud would somehow make it better. It changed nothing. “So, when are you from? Do you remember the date?”

“2018.”

He frowned. “You’re pre-World War III, then. That’s the big one we study in grade school. You all finally went at it with those nuclear warheads. Baptism by fire. Consecrate the holy land over, and over, and over again.”

“We’re not on the verge of any war, I don’t think-”

Keith still hadn’t moved his hand. “You will be soon. Climate change, food crises, power and wealth imbalance.” Keith looked out the window at the shattered Earth. “There weren’t many survivors, I mean, look at what happened to the planet.”

“It doesn’t look like people, or anything really, can live there anymore.”

“Nope. We have some active moon bases, a few large space stations, a colony on Titan. We’ve sent terraforming expeditions back to Earth, but no luck.”

“We? Are you human? I thought you were until we got here and now, well,” Shiro trailed off again, not wanting to offend, but realizing that he had somewhere along the way stopped seeing his traveling companions the way he wanted to see them and had instead begun to see them the way they were.

“I’m half-human. A similar thing happened to my mother’s people. The Galra,” he said.

Shiro repeated the word, carefully enunciating the syllables.

“The gist of it is they found Earth in this state while looking for a new planet to colonize.”

Keith did not use “we” to describe that relationship, not that it mattered, but Shiro wondered why.

They sailed above the surface of the moon, miraculously still intact. Looking down, Shiro watched as they passed over a crater, close enough to see the dusty, pitted surface. The shuttle recalibrated its trajectory using the weak gravity to course correct, sending them off in a completely different direction. “Are we going to your home?”

“No.”

Keith’s eyes wandered over Shiro’s bare chest again. “You really can’t survive in space like that, and we are going to have to go outside at some point.”

Shiro frowned.

“I don’t know the first thing about space suits.”

Keith shrugged. “Neither do I. Just pretend and have confidence in it because if you don’t, well, you know. It’s Dream.” He paused. “I don’t think Dream can outright kill. It doesn’t seem to have a conscience or any sort of moral compass, really. I’ve seen it happen enough times now that it tends to be the fault of the individual. If you believe you’re going to die, then you probably will. We have a lot of control here. Our destinies are what we make them.”

“How does that work for you?” Shiro asked.

“What do you mean? The are ruptures in my lungs from the atmosphere where I am. My body _is_ dying. On the other hand, I know this place, it’s old hat. It’s easier to put up a facade and perform when you know what to expect. Hunk’s dreamscape was the hardest. It’s hard to imagine being comfortable when you’re convinced you shouldn’t be.”

“It could have been a cold desert.”

“You didn’t look like you thought it was cold.”

“I-” Shiro shut his mouth and hummed. Keith had a point. 

Shiro reached out to touch the fabric of Keith’s suit, smooth, and soft. In texture, it reminded him of suede as he ran his fingertips down Keith’s arm. Keith pulled off his other glove and smoothed them both out over his thigh. Shiro slipped his fingers under the sleeve to feel the hem, the pads of his fingers trailing over Keith’s smooth, cold skin.

The world before him went in and out, a bright light encroaching from the periphery of his vision that suddenly cut him off from the world. Reeling, he squeezed his eyes tightly shut and tried to collect himself.

_Panic. He had to calm down, to try again. His right arm still didn’t work. He tried his fingers. No. Wrist? No. Elbow? No. The other hand worked, but his arm remained pinned._

_He couldn’t do it. This was how his life would end, drowned barely inches below the surface of the river. He tried again, but couldn’t pull away from the seatbelt locked in place. How long would this take? Perhaps if he could twist to the side, he could pull his left arm out, but it was still stuck. His body refused to cooperate. Something rocked the car, and he felt the pressure on his arm release. A slender hand suddenly plunged inside, reaching out toward him, bright eyes, and a cloud of inky darkness behind, blotting out the sun._

_The stranger had a knife._

_He thought he should try to move, delay the inevitable, but the temptation to give in was too much. Nothing mattered anymore. He felt his eyelids close slowly, and then_ s _uddenly the stranger’s lips pressed hard against his own, gripping his jaw in one strong hand and breathing into his mouth._

_Air. Sweet, precious air._

_Gone._

_And then the stranger did it again._

_The flat of the blade pressed against his chest, then pulled away, same at his hip. He felt the buoyant freedom of his floating form and the stranger’s hands on him, but he wasn’t sure. He couldn’t tell._

_“Hey! Stay with me!” the stranger pled, squeezing his hand, the feeling at once familiar and foreign. “We’ll get you through this.”_

“Shiro? Hey, Shiro? You okay?” Keith patted his shoulder.

He blinked. “Yeah, yeah. Sorry. I thought I remembered something.” There was something familiar about the face peering up at him with genuine concern, that he just couldn’t place.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“I’m not sure,” Shiro answered honestly. “It felt like you were there, but I’m pretty sure that isn’t the case.”

He sighed and slumped in his seat, throwing back his head and cracking it against the window. Did they know each other on the other side? He knew he hadn’t imagined the fleeting, accidental touches, lingering attention, yet now, when they were finally alone, he just didn’t know.

“Shiro,” Keith’s voice cracked as he looked away, toward the silver moon in the window, growing smaller and smaller. “Just-” He changed his mind about what he wanted to say. “Look, you have to come up with your own spacesuit because after getting Lance through his quest, I don’t have the energy.”

Silently, Shiro complied, matching the look and feel of Keith’s spacesuit as best he could. From his scarf-turned-bubble-turned-scarf-again, he fashioned a helmet that sealed at the neck when he slipped it over his head. The shuttle had changed its power source, the ride so smooth he only knew they had sped up because the stars passed by more swiftly as they carved through the vacuous space approaching the red planet.

Mars. Keith could have told him that, and why not? It was, from the viewpoint of his timeline, the most viable option for colonization, _if_ the planet could be terraformed to support carbon-based life.

“The relics on this planet have been here longer than recorded civilization on Earth.” Keith tugged his gloves on one at a time then gathered his hair and stuffed it down the back of his suit before putting his own helmet on and sealing it up. He checked the seals at his wrists and ankles then pressed a button on the side of his helmet, and the golden faceplate obscuring his features slid back to reveal his face. Keith pointed to a building complex out the window as the shuttle slowed through the thin atmosphere. “Look down there.” His voice came crystal clear through a speaker in Shiro’s helmet, and he wondered if it worked because he wanted it to, or because Keith did, or both.

It reminded Shiro of the Giza plateau, with an arrangement of pyramidal structures to mirror the same. All of it built of the orange-red earth. “I didn’t think this could be real. I mean, I’ve heard of pyramids on Mars, but I thought it was a hoax.”

“Hmmph.” Keith blew the sound through his nose. “Your era is so funny. You have all this evidence in front of your eyes, and yet you can’t seem to _see_ it. We still know very little about the people who lived here in the past, but something happened that stripped the atmosphere. We think they lost communication and went underground, but with the devastation on the surface, they soon died out. Earth-born colonists came in the twenty-first century, but that didn’t last long. Your people didn’t quite understand the nature of the weather systems, particularly the dust storms. I came here later as part of an exploratory mission. We were tasked with sample collection, environmental data retrieval, that sort of thing.”

“To rebuild the colony?”

“What colony?” Keith snorted.

The shuttle touched down smoothly, feather-light and dead quiet when it landed on the soil.

“Ready?” Keith asked as he stood, his fingers resting lightly on Shiro’s arm.

He nodded.

Keying a code into the panel beside the door, the latch clicked and with a sharp hiss, the airlock released and the door slid open.

“Red” as a descriptor was far from adequate. A range from the deepest cordovan to a dusting of sienna permeated the rugged landscape. Though thin, the silty air diffused the sunlight. In the distance, wind tunnels coiled up to the sky skipped across the plain.

Keith pivoted around as he stepped in front of Shiro and reached up to the side of his helmet, pressing a button.

The gold-plated shield snapped shut, and once Keith engaged his own, Shiro could no longer see his face.

“We still have to worry about radiation here.” He took Shiro’s hand, subtleties aside, and started off toward the distant pyramids.

Keith kicked at the dust, watching it spray before them and glisten in the distant sun before slowly meandering back to the ground. “So tell me, what do they believe about these structures where you’re from?”

“Pyramids?”

“Yeah. I’m curious.”

“They’re tombs? Uh, some whacked-out theories align them with constellations.”

“Right, because ancient civilizations couldn’t possibly have advanced technology so they must have come from aliens, right?”

Shiro held his tongue.

“The pyramids are actually part of an ancient power grid.”

Shiro hadn’t expected that. “W-what?”

“Yeah.”

Keith led them toward the looming structure, approaching more quickly than Shiro realized. The Martian pyramid stood partially covered with rubble and the ever-present dust. He expected to feel cold this far away from the sun, but with no wind chill to drive off heat in the thin atmosphere, he found the temperature comfortable.

“Was Tesla during your time?” Keith asked. “It’s hard to keep your timeline straight.” He threw up his free hand in accepting frustration.

_What can you do?_

“A little earlier.”

“So you know that he solved the problem of providing power to the entire world. It’s basically a rediscovery of what your ancient civilizations already knew. Pretty neat, I think.”

Shiro grunted acknowledgment and nodded, although Keith probably couldn’t see that part. “I’m guessing the coils or similar power source are inside? Does it still work?”

“Yes and no. You’ll see.”

They stopped at the base of the monument, or building. Shiro was no longer sure what to call it. The pyramid loomed high and dazzlingly pale orange in the light. Ancient, eroded, but the remnants of the polished stone still glistened beneath the climbing sun. Before them, a small entrance rose up from the dusty base facing them. Heavy masonry defined the crisp enframement, but there was no door. They stepped inside.

Strips of lights ran down the center of each pathway, to the right, left, and down a descending staircase. Keith raised the first gold visor on his helmet and gestured toward the stairs.

Shiro raised his shielding visor as well and followed.

“When this was built, there were aquifers below. You have an insulating outer shell, granite chambers throughout the structure that function as conductors, and what would have been a gold capstone at the peak. At least that’s what I was told. I don’t really know how it works; I’m not a scientist. It no longer powers the grid across the planet, but with a few repairs, it probably could.”

The staircase spanned barely two feet across, and while Shiro could see the end in sight, it seemed eternally far away, the ceiling flat above as they journeyed on. The walls were barren and smooth; he would have called them futuristic had he not known they had been there a very long time. Or had they?

“Do you know how old this is?”

“This is one of many we found when we mapped the planet. We think it’s older than the ones on Earth.” They stopped at the bottom of the stairs, the way ahead dark, but instead of proceeding through the doorless entrance, Keith stepped aside to looked at something on the inside of his wrist, a slim, gold band projecting strange characters upward with a dim red glow. As Shiro watched, they reconfigured to numbers.

Keith was checking the date and time.

“This puts us several weeks after the last time I was here. Dream has no extraction contingent, you know. We were using this as a means of exploration. Dry run in Dream and then go off to do the real thing. Generally speaking, it’s a better safety protocol; train where there’s the least risk to prepare you for what’s really out there. That’s the beauty of this vast sub-realm. And every soul who’s been here has imprinted their memories on it. When you think about it, that’s a lot of memories.”

Banks of lights switched on, one by one when they entered, the cold white chill illuminating the metal gangway on which they stood. Everything here felt sterile and stale. Drops of humidity formed on Shiro’s suit even as he watched. His body heat causing water to condense from the air around him. Water.

So there really was water on Mars.

Keith pressed on, never stopping or slowing his pace.

“What is this place?” Shiro asked, his voice echoing through the expansive space, off the steely gray metal walls and down to the depths below.

“I told you, it’s a power plant. One of many that forms a network over the surface of the planet, but this is the primer.” At the end of the path, Keith turned around but didn’t look at him, heading down a small ladder to the next walkway, rung by rung until he disappeared from view.

Shiro followed.

“My job was to get the team in and out again. That’s it. Pilots aren’t expected to do much more than that. I was an extra set of hands if they needed it, and they did. The purpose of the mission was to find life.”

“What do you mean? There’s no one here but us, right? Didn’t you imply that Martian civilization is dead?”

“People clearly lived here at one point. They built these structures, farmed, drank of the same water now dripping down the front of your suit. It’s hard to imagine there is nothing here now, don’t you think? No plants, animals, not a single microbe or cellular creature waiting to evolve?”

Shiro agreed with that assessment. “Did you find it? Find life?”

“You’re getting ahead of yourself,” Keith answered and refused to say more.

The climb felt long. Where Pidge’s trek had been like a walk in a park, Hunk’s a grueling afternoon, and Lance’s a quick swim, Keith’s seemed unnecessarily arduous and repetitive.

Keith coughed and cleared his throat. At one point, he checked something on his wristband again and lifted the visor on his helmet. Sighing, he breathed in.

“It’s okay here. The air is safe for both of us.”

“Is it really?”

Keith shrugged. “Who knows. It’s easier to pretend it works the way it does in reality. That way you won’t panic.”

Shiro lifted his visor too, feeling scant relief at the warm, stale air surrounding them.

They kept on to yet another door.

“I don’t know if it was a plot or a coverup or bad science. We wanted to live here, bring our remaining people to this planet to thrive, or so I thought.” Keith faced the door, stock still before it. “Down here I finally understood what the Galra had been looking for when they came to this solar system. They call it X9Y, by the way. Isn’t that funny? You don’t even have a name for your own solar system!”  He tried to laugh, but the sound hitched in his throat and he coughed again, spitting out a wad of blood, barely missing his boot. “The Galra were looking for stable genetic data compatible with their own. Human beings had that, and it works. I’m a prime example. You think the conditions on your planet are so limited, but the window for life is far less narrow than you think. They came here to breed people and to breed with people, and to do that, they needed a place for those people to thrive, like this, a terraformable planet.”

“So wait, how did you-”

“My mom was on a scouting mission, and she met my dad out here. I was born on the earth-moon colony. The short version is that the Galra wanted Mars, Mars was technically not theirs to have, but this is the sticks of the Milky Way and the Galactic Collective pretty much just turned a blind eye to much of what they did. The Galra had control of a huge amount of resources and labor, and even if it was forced labor from a network of enslaved planets, intergalactic war is bad for commerce. In any case, before you take over a lifeless planet, you need to be able to prove it’s devoid of life.”

“That’s why you were here.”

“Yes, and all the data I saw indicated that Mars is _not_ lifeless.”

“Which means?”

“Which means we were supposed to leave.”

Keith pressed his hand against a locking mechanism on the double doors, and they quietly slid apart. Above, banks of lights flickered on and a heady, acrid stench wafted out from the darkness.

The first body lay in a heap at Keith’s feet with what looked like some sort of pistol beside it. He nudged it with his boot and the helmet separated from the suit, the same that he and Shiro now wore. A mash of flesh and gore slid down the inside of the visor and separated from the skull as it rocked away and the stink of death rose up to meet them.

It hit Shiro like a freight train and kept on coming. He reeled, nauseated and gagging, bile burning it’s way up his esophagus as he gripped the railing and puked over the side. He panted, sweat prickling over his clammy skin and dripping down his cheeks, as he looked down and saw no bottom to the chamber.

Keith stood frozen in place, expression dull and emotionless.

Wiping his mouth across the sleeve of his space suit, Shiro struggled to his feet. He released the catch on his visor and sealed it shut. “Doesn’t that bother you?”

With a shake of his head, Keith answered. “Not really, no.”

Shiro collected himself. Staring at the body, he realized that the person, whoever they were, had been significantly taller than even Hunk and broad. The person had died in fetal position, curled inward and clutching their stomach. As Shiro walked around the corpse, he realized that they had been wounded, a cut in the fabric of the body, at least two inches wide and coated with a dried substance, deep purple-red, that Shiro assumed was blood.

When he looked up, Keith had already started on again toward a point near the center of the chamber, where the pathway led to a platform cantilevered out. Great columns rose up from the fathomless depths, rising to a ceiling he couldn’t see. The platform held what looked like a control panel of some sort. Two more bodies lined the path, one splayed out face down in a dried up pool of blood that Keith gingerly tiptoed around, and the other slumped against the railing, a blast to the chest having split the cavity right down the sternum. A fourth had expired over the control unit on the platform, hand outstretched toward something unseen from Shiro’s present vantage.

“Keith?”

“Do we terraform the planet or not? It’s only simple when you can be absolutely certain that the planet is dead, and here’s the thing, most planets in a habitable zone within our universe, have life. By most, I mean 99.9%, more or less. So that turns this into a question of ethics. It also means the testing period is long, the protocol rigorous. And when everyone else is wrong, what exactly _is_ the right thing to do?” Keith walked past the third body.

Shiro noted the wounds, similar to that of the first corpse, one in the neck, and the other in the kidneys “What are you saying?” He followed, trailing like a lost puppy, as Keith made his way up to the platform.

Upon reaching the control unit, Keith pushed the body off and pressed the palm of his glove against the curved screen, inside the etched outline of a small, humanoid hand. “Recreating a homeworld is a pipe dream. In my opinion, we should have combined our resources and built stations in free space, floating colonies and communities for our people to thrive. We have the technology. We no longer need _this_.”

Loud bangs and creaks with the squeal of metal on metal rose up from below. Slowly, an oblong missile rose up through the center of the platform, a small panel on the side blinking red.

“This was here before us. From what we could gather, it’s a terraforming device. The idea is to shoot it into the atmosphere where a series of reactions will allow it to rebalance and rebuild the air content and quality to sustain life like our own. The vault is farther down. It’s just racks full of frozen seeds and tubes of genetic material. We don’t even know what kinds of plants any of them are, but presumably, we’ll need them to get enough oxygen into the air. Combine that with liquid water, and we’re almost there.” Keith’s voice tightened, his lips drew into a line across his face as he stared first at the device and then at each of the bodies they had passed. He held his arms tightly across his chest.

“Keith,” Shiro spoke slowly. “What exactly happened here?”

Swallowing hard, he went on, his words so quiet Shiro could barely hear. “We disagreed over whether or not to use the device. Nevermind the mission or the protocol. It wasn’t supposed to get out of hand in here. It’s not even real!” He slammed his fist down hard on the console, cracking the touch-plate.

“You’re not answering the question.”

With a deep breath, Keith licked his lips. “Of my party, I was the only one able to operate the device because I’m human, or human enough, I guess. The rest of my team decided that we should deploy it, and while I know this is not real, the choices you make here do have consequences. For yourself, that is, when you wake up, and you might not be the person you thought you were. I ended up in Threshold for who knows how long because of what I did here.” He pointed to the body nearest the door. “He said he’d make me do it whether I wanted to or not.”

Keith leaned over the console, struggling to maintain his composure, jaw clenched tight. He gripped the edge of the panel so hard his knuckles turned white. “Someone once told me to be the change I wanted to see. Well, I’m not sure I did it right, but I sure did something. Their blood is on my hands. Sometimes you have to kill to survive.” He shifted his gaze back to the body with the split chest. Reaching down, he took the dagger from its sheath and handed it, handle first to Shiro.

Shiro took it, hefting the weight in his hand. “Was it worth it?”

“I don’t know,” Keith said. “I’ve had a lot of time to think about it. You could argue it either way. It still hurts. I felt betrayed like they already knew this was here and they brought me along just because they thought they could coerce me into a dry run. I don’t know for sure, but that’s what I think. I was asked to join this mission, and I wanted to go. Anything to get off the moon base. They probably thought I’d be more like them, but I grew up in a completely different culture. More importantly, I believe that you have to stand up for what you believe and for yourself. I thought I might be able to talk my way out, but when you’ve got a gun at your back?” He grimaced and shuddered. “I don’t think I could have done it differently if that’s what you mean.”

“I think I understand,” Shiro stared at the blade, just the right size to slide between ribs. He dragged the pad of one gloved thumb over the edge, and it skinned the material. He unwrapped the guard, revealing a glowing blue sigil at the center. “You have to own who and what you are. That includes what you do. There isn’t always a perfect solution. Besides, I wasn’t there, and I can’t judge.” He reached for Keith’s hand and squeezed.

Keith squeezed back, then slowly and carefully took off his helmet. Holding back his hair, he pulled the neck of his suit down just enough for Shiro to see. The sigil, Keith’s sigil, glowed a deep garnet red, with blood dripping off the edge of a knife. Perspiration glistened over the image, bringing it so vividly to life that Shiro reached out to touch, but Keith pulled away.

“Vrepit Sa.”

“What?” Shiro furrowed his brow. For the first time in Dream, he heard foreign words as they were spoken.

“It’s a Galra salute. It translates roughly to ‘killing thrust.’”

Shiro nodded, not knowing whether to laugh or just accept the deadpan delivery and decided it was best to do nothing. He understood now why Keith had wanted to return. There were things to be done once he woke up.

“So, what now?” Shiro secured the dagger in his utility belt.

“Dismantle the terraforming device. I think it was left here for a reason, but maybe the people who created it ultimately objected to using it, too, or maybe they died out before they could use it. Who knows?” Keith scrolled through several documents he had pulled up on the screen. Shiro tried to follow, the symbols transforming to words he could barely glimpse before Keith swiped it off the screen and went on to the next. “All of the files are here. From concept to the final product we see here.” He stopped, scanning down the document, then pressed a sequence into a pad on the side of the missile-shaped object.

“Then what?”

Keith didn’t answer immediately. “I-I’m not sure.”

With a whistling hiss, the cylindrical canister of the body split into two halves that Keith pried away, exposing the guts of the device. They worked by the book, backward from the assembly notes. Shiro relaxed into concentrated interest, in awe of the elegant chemistry that allowed this to even be conceived, and the physics and engineering that brought it into existence.

Deep, wracking coughs brought him back from his daydream. Keith stepped back, bent double as his shoulders shook. Something nearly black and viscous spilled from his mouth, spattering at his feet. He heaved and vomited, blood and chunks of something from inside his stomach.

“Keith!” Shiro grabbed him by the shoulders, rubbing his back and helping him sit down beside the control deck. “You’ve got to take control!” But he knew it wasn’t going to happen. Keith’s chin fell heavily to his chest and his eyelids fluttered, the black ooze dribbling down his chin.

Shiro had to end the dream; he knew no other way to fix it. They had disassembled half the device, including most of the chemical components. He hoped that was good enough, and setting doubt aside, he shoved it right off the plinth and watched it fall until the darkness swallowed it up.

Beneath them, the platform began to shake, support beams creaked the sound echoing through the chamber.

“Shiro?” Keith said weakly, struggling to get off the ground. “What did you-”

With a deafening boom, all artificial light abruptly sucked in on itself, until the room fell entirely black except for faint white rays of light from an unknown source high above them. Shiro grabbed Keith’s hand just as the platform dropped out beneath them, and together they fell. The glow above grew stronger, approaching them faster than gravity could suck them down. Shiro reached for Keith’s other hand, for the first time noticing how other he seemed —like someone slipped out between very different planes of reality and caught halfway between the worlds, fractured and fragmented, only partially there.

Keith said something, violet eyes with the secrets of the cosmos penetrating through to his very core. Shiro couldn’t hear, the only sounds in his head like the whisper of the ocean in a nautilus shell.

They hung suspended in the swath of light, hands clasped, Keith mouthing those words he could not make out, and then, as the brightness intensified, it washed over them like a veil and swallowed them up.

The chaos ended as suddenly as it had begun.

Stillness filled the void. Stillness then nothing.


	6. Reunion

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Fin.

Moonlight bathed the night, creeping over the interior of the sterile room as it flooded the tiled floor. Shiro could feel the tidal waves, in and out flowing over the ceramic, pooling in the grout.

All was quiet. He followed the light as shadows trekked across the floor, counting time’s measured march as it slowly slipped away. The monitor next to him displayed the rhythm of his heart, the numbers slow and steady, tracking his pulse and his blood pressure. He read the date and time off the screen. It had only been a few days, and yet it had seemed he’d been gone an eternity.

Looking down at himself, he watched his feet beneath the blankets. He wriggled his toes and lifted his left hand, but try as he might, he couldn’t move his right.

_Oh, right. The accident._

Glancing over at where his arm should have been he saw the bandaged stump. He felt like he should have been surprised, but he already knew this was how he was. He’d had plenty of time to get used to the idea.

He imagined himself the prosthetic. Surely that would work to fix this. His was the final stop, wasn’t it?

The dream construct never came.

He concentrated all his energy on it, picturing every elegant curve, just as he’d done before.

Nothing.

Shiro had awoken in a hospital.

He propped himself up on his elbow, brushing against the needle taped to his arm and attached to a tube. Following it up, he read the label. Morphine.

Intravenous morphine.

Throwing back his heavy head, he took a deep breath and looked over at his missing arm again.

Still gone. What would that mean for his future? He didn’t know. Inconvenience? Frustration? Anger at himself for being a stupid, distracted driver?

Replaying the incident in his mind left him with questions, and he knew he’d probably never have an answer.

At least he hadn’t hurt anybody else.

At least he wasn’t dead.

Leafy branches scrabbled at his window outside, begging for entry. On the nightstand beside his bed sat a glass of water and a scientific journal, dried out from having been soaked, now crisp and wavy lay folded open to an article. Particle superposition, when a single particle appears to be in two places at the same time. He knew it by heart; he’d written it with credits to his research team. Quantum physicist Dr. Takashi Shirogane indeed. He laughed at himself. He, a scientist, had dreamed up a place where the natural world no longer followed the rules. It had been a dream, hadn’t it?

He needed to clear his head.

Mustering what strength he could despite his reeling head and the dull ache in his phantom limb, Shiro managed to sit up. He carefully peeled the tape from his IV and gently eased it out. He checked his sensors and pulled them off. The monitor’s alarm pinged softly beside the bed. A nurse would probably show up soon, but he had to get out of the bed. Swinging his legs over the side, he tried to stand, steadying himself and his jelly knees against the bedrail.

With a great effort, he gritted his teeth and shuffled barefoot toward the door, a chill at his back where his hospital gown had come untied.

Upon exiting the room, he made his way down a long hallway, disparagingly dingy and dull in the dimmed yellow lights. As he pushed his way through a set of double doors, he thought he heard voices. Familiar ones, and yet he knew it could only be his imagination.

He chalked it up to strong drugs and several days of lying unconscious in a bed, expecting it to stop. When it didn’t, he decided to find the source and perhaps put his overreaching mind to rest. Rounding a corner, Shiro spotted a reception desk, almost taking the sight as his cue to turn around, but the attendant paid him no heed, conked out on a pillow of paperwork, lightly snoring. A sign on the wall pointed to a waiting area and as he approached the chatter grew louder.

When he peered through the open doorway, the sight of a small figure holding up an enormous bag of fast food greeted him. Her moppy auburn hair framed her face like a blustery day and matched her eyes.

He knew her.

“Dinner is served!” she announced, handing it over to outstretched arms at the end of a sofa that faced away from the door.

“Pidge?” Shiro asked before he could stop himself, stepping inside the room. His voice cracked from disuse, and he cleared his throat.

When she saw him, her jaw fell slack. The man who had taken the bag twisted around, bright blue eyes wide in astonishment. At the other end of the couch, another man with broad back and shoulders followed suit.

“Shiro?” he whispered, standing.

“Hunk? Shiro tried again, looking from him to Pidge to blue-eyes who could only be- “Lance?”

Blue-eyes dropped the bag and stumbled over a coffee table, trying to get around to the door. “You’re awake!”

It _was_ him.

Lance flung his arms around Shiro and held him tight.

“Careful!” Hunk cautioned, joining them. “How are you feeling?”

“Well, I’m not entirely sure-”

“You made it!” Lance still hadn’t let him go.

“I told you he’d pull through,” Pidge said.

She had told him so herself in the back of an ambulance. The mists of unconsciousness had parted for just a moment, and he’d looked up at her face.

_“You’re going to pull through.”_

Lance was talking, but he hadn’t been following.

“Pidge was on the EMS team that came when Hunk called 911. After I got you and the other guy out of the river-”

_Other guy?_

_Keith._

He stepped back, breaking free of the embrace. “Where’s Keith?”

Hunk drew his mouth into a hard line that cut a chasm across his face, staring at Pidge. Lance shut his mouth, sighing through his nose.

Panic began to set in. Had all of them made it but Keith?

No, no, that couldn’t be right. Keith had been alive in Dream when he’d gone on, trying to tell him something. It was just a bad dream, it had to be, a thing of no consequence. Yet he knew their names.

They knew his. They’d called him Shiro.

And so, he asked again, the long fingers of disquiet digging into the core of his reason, “Where’s Keith? He didn’t-He’s not-”

It couldn’t be true.

“He’s in intensive care.” Pidge raised her eyes to meet his.

“Where?” Shiro demanded, suddenly knowing he had to see for himself. He had to know that he hadn’t made this up, that each of them existed, that they weren’t figments of his imagination.

After a moment ’s contemplation, Pidge nodded and made for the door. “I’ll show you.”

They followed her out to the emergency stairwell where they ascended two floors. There was no lounge on this floor, just rows of rooms with large windows for observation, strangely quiet even in the dead of night.

Pidge strode with purpose, knowing exactly where she was headed. She’d probably brought him in herself. At the end of a long hall, she stopped in front of the last door, the observation window open.

Shiro looked in through the window, transfixed by the sight. The single bed held the room’s lone occupant, hooked up to several machines and receiving oxygen through a mask. The name printed and stuffed into the plastic holder beside the door read, “ _Kogane, Keith_.”

“Was it, I mean, is he here because of me?” His chest clenched as if it had the power to squeeze his heart dry, and he held his breath, hoping for someone to waylay his fears.

Hunk stood beside him, staring through the glass. “He’s sick. You know that.”

_We all know that._

“But why, then? Why would he risk his life for a stranger?” Shiro didn’t wait. He grabbed the handle and turned, pushing the door in as he entered. Pidge, Lance, and Hunk filed in behind him.

Under the red and green lights of the digital monitor, Keith remained perfectly still, its regular blip marking the slow but steady beat of his heart.  His hands had been arranged above the blankets that swallowed him up. He looked more alive in Shiro’s dream and memory than he did now, sinking into oblivion. Someone had combed his coal black hair away from his face, wet with sweat and a slick of perspiration glossed his cheeks and forehead. 

Shiro knelt beside the bed and reached out to touch his hand. Hunk had the right of it; Shiro knew. This was not the sickness of someone who had nearly drowned pulling him from a sinking car, Keith had been ill for a long time.

He blinked back hot tears, angry at himself that he couldn’t keep them inside, still slightly untethered and lightheaded from the painkillers, his emotions likewise unfettered. He clenched his jaw, failing in all of his efforts to maintain a modicum of control.

He couldn’t do it.

A soft moan escaped the mask, so low Shiro didn’t think he had actually heard it at first. The monitor beeped faster, and Keith’s eyelids fluttered as he slowly raised his free hand to tug the mask from his face.

“Thank you,” he whispered with a shuddering breath.

Shiro didn’t need to be thanked; he’d done nothing. A large hand rubbed his back, and another squeezed his shoulder. The smallest palm, soft and warm, patted his arm.

“You saved me,” he managed between awkward gulps and sniffles.

Keith shook his head, his dark eyes unfocused, fathomless and glassy. He tried to speak, and Shiro leaned in, finally composed enough to listen, waiting for him to try again.

“We saved each other.”

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by Catherynne Valente’s "Palimpsest" and Elizabeth Hand’s "Saffron and Brimstone."
> 
> Many thanks to my beta readers whose patience and insightful commentary got me through this.
> 
> Every chapter is written- I'll be posting weekly updates.


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